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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24322231">say not soft things</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/justfine/pseuds/justfine'>justfine</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>1917 (Movie 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Entirely Self-Indulgent, Gen, Period Typical Attitudes, rossi doing the bare minimum, unapologetic use of scots</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:02:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>21,294</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24322231</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/justfine/pseuds/justfine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The war, according to Private Rossi.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. in day and hour o' danger</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>did 1917 really think they could have one (1) scot and i wouldn't project onto and/or provide a backstory for him??? not realistic. hence this. title is from charles hamilton sorley's poem "when you see millions of the mouthless dead" and the quote below is from a letter to a friend.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>But isn't all this bloody? I am full of mute and burning rage and annoyance and sulkiness about it. I could wager that out of twelve million eventual combatants there aren’t twelve who really want it. </em>
</p><p>— Charles Hamilton Sorley</p><p>*</p><p>From atop the brick-built midden, Giacomo Rossi surveyed the backcourt.</p><p>It had rained that morning. Puddles had formed where the cobblestone dipped and turned to dirt in the centre, swamping up to become a make-do pool for Rossi’s youngest sibling, Gianni, to teach his toy soldier how to swim. With a shoelace wrapped around his neck to keep him from drowning, the little figure lapped around the water with the same ease as he did in the wash house bath. He shot a proud, gap-toothed grin from where he crouched, bare feet touching the edge of the water.</p><p>Gianni was not the only of his siblings in the backcourt. Maria, though he could not see her for the washing that hung from the line, was by the coal shed, giggling with some of the other girls that lived in their block. Linda could be heard screaming bloody murder down the close, finally free of scarlet fever and back to terrorise the younger boys that followed her with a strange, apostle-like devotion. His youngest surviving sister, Carmela, was perched on his lap, anchored back to his chest with an arm around her middle.</p><p>It was late in the day by then, cold in the shadow of the three-storey tenement. Tall and grey, they encircled the backcourt like prison walls, broken only by narrow, smoke-stained windows that let in no light. Occasionally a face would appear, ghost-like and brief behind the glass; a mother checking on her children or calling them up for bed, rousing discontent from the ground below. </p><p>Against his front, Rossi felt Carmela grow heavy with sleep.</p><p>It was time to take her back upstairs, he thought, beginning to turn her in his lap. She hooked her skinny arms around his neck automatically, allowing him to make the short drop to the ground. He hitched her further up his hip.</p><p>“You too, wee fella,” he called to Gianni, offering out his free hand.</p><p>Gianni came, obedient as the soldier he carried. Rossi slowed to his toddle as he took his hand, swinging him up each of the back steps one by one, much to his loud, hearty glee. The noise echoed up the grimy close, travelling with them to the second floor. He opened the door and let his little brother lead the way inside.</p><p>There were seven of them in the small room-and-kitchen flat. The stale smell of damp and paraffin permeated the air despite the draught from the windows that looked out on the front street and backcourt. It was especially bad in the main room where their mother had slathered oil into the bug-infested floorboards, the stench of it spreading a headache like the flu. Though it brought a chill, Rossi was always silently pleased his own shakedown of blankets was right beneath the window.</p><p>Before he went through to find his mother and sister in the kitchen, he set Carmela down on her mattress and helped Gianni climb into the cavity bed. He kissed his dirty cheek and pulled over the sheet that hung in place of a door.</p><p>“You didnae tell them, then,” his sister, Elisa, threw at him as he shut the door to the kitchen gently behind him. “Jesus, Jack, <em>ye promised</em>.”</p><p>Both Elisa and his mother Jeanie were sat at a large, rectangular table in the corner of the room. Elisa was watching her knit, though she could never do so herself. An accident at the carpet factory she worked at as a child had left her right arm useless, as if boneless, so her hand always remained tucked into the pocket of her pinafore. Her other hand, though, was clenched on the surface of the table. It would have slammed down already had they been alone.</p><p>As it was, his mother would not allow for such nonsense.</p><p>“Leave him be,” she said. Lately, she had been offering him the reprieve reserved for a dying man. It was somehow worse than her open disapproval. “You didnae have yer dinner.”</p><p>Rossi ate his pieces and butter, sprinkling the last of them with sugar as a treat. Maria and Linda returned while he was eating, so he tore it up and handed them each a bit before bed. Linda had hers on the floor, sat between their mother’s legs as she took a bone comb through her hair, making sure she was free of nits before she went back to school.  </p><p>God only knew what the children could catch in the backcourt.</p><p>By midnight, all was quiet on their street but for a half-drunken quarrel from the single end on the landing below and Maria’s heavy breathing. She slept on the mattress with Carmela and Elisa, her leg permanently hanging over the edge, such was the lack of space. In the cavity bed, from where he lay, he could not see Linda over the body of his mother, who slept with Gianni in the crook of her arm, as though he was still a baby.</p><p>Head propped up against the wall, he watched Gianni whimper in his sleep. He would be the man of the house soon enough, he thought with a strange alarm.</p><p>It was then he heard his name through the silence. Not from one of his siblings quietly pleading for him to take them to the water closet on the landing, but somewhere more distant. Somewhere outside. He uncoiled himself from his blanket and rose to his knees, just able to see out the window that gave upon the narrow street.</p><p>Stood by the mouth of the close was Martin Devine.</p><p>In the dark, he felt for his trousers and pulled them on. He did not bother with shoes though the stairwell was often wet. Moving quietly over the floor, he took one glance around the room before stepping out of his house and onto the landing. It smelt rancid, like a burst drain. He wrinkled his nose as he padded down the steps, socks soaking through, all the way to the ground landing. A black slab of a silhouette against the light from the streetlamps, Martin was sat at the end of the close, waiting. Rossi hung back for a moment, mumbling a rehearsed retort to the shite he might throw at him, then went to sit beside him.</p><p>“You’ve some cheek comin’ round here, y’know,” Rossi said. “Here—gi’e me a fag.”</p><p>Martin offered out the packet and Rossi took one, muttering thanks.</p><p>“Says ah was sorry didn’t ah,” he said and lit his cigarette for him. “Take it ye did it, then? Signed up and aw that?”</p><p>He nodded<em> aye</em>, letting the first exhale of smoke leave his mouth and watch it dance skywards into the night. When he lowered his eyes again, he let them settle on Martin. In the breast pocket of his jacket was a little white feather, displayed like a badge of honour. Rossi plucked it free and twirled it between his fingers by the quill.</p><p>“Ah leave the morra,” he told him. “Fuck knows how ‘am gettin down there, though.”</p><p>At the recruitment office, he had been given his Certificate of Enlistment and told to report to a hall by Waterloo Station at nine o’clock with the other stragglers on what was now the day after tomorrow. He was beginning to regret not picking something closer to home. </p><p>Martin crushed his cigarette beneath his foot and leaned back on his hands, surveying the identical line of grey tenements that rose before them. From a first-floor window a white bedsheet hung in pitiful surrender above a peeling poster of Lord Kitchener pointing in their direction. In all the years Rossi had lived there, it had not so much changed as eroded away to the very bones of what a human-being could tolerate and endure.</p><p>He tucked the feather back into Martin’s pocket, tossed aside his own cigarette and mirrored him.</p><p>“Ah could write to you,” Martin said.</p><p>“Don’t be fucking daft,” he retorted hotly, but simmered when he realised there was something he did want. “Will ye dae somethin’ else for me, but?”</p><p>“Aye, anything.”</p><p>“Will ye—” His lips pursed around his words as he stared down the close of the opposite tenement. He could make out the backcourt through the darkness. “Will ye keep a wee eye on my ma and the weans for me? Just—make sure they’re awright an’ that.”</p><p>Martin nodded.</p><p>“And if ah don’t come hame—"</p><p>“Aye, course ah will,” he said. “Course ah will. Nae bother.”</p><p>Between them, their hands lay together, almost touching. For a moment, Rossi extended out his shaky fingers but caught them back in a fist before his fingertips could trace the bony valleys of Martin’s knuckles. He sat up and shook his head at himself, flexing his traitorous fingers against the base of his sternum until it delivered a cleansing flare of pain.</p><p>“Cheers.”</p><p>If there was something left to say he might never get the chance again to say it, he thought, though it forced nothing else out of him, not even as he watched Martin disappear off into the shadow of the alley. He stayed there for a bit, temple rested against the wall as his knees tucked up close to his chest, until the night grew too cold.</p><p>He returned to the flat with sodden feet to find Carmela had commandeered his shakedown. Smiling sadly, he crept beneath the blanket and pulled his little sister to his chest, singing her back to sleep with a quiet, “<em>Though the waves heave, soft will ye sleep…” </em></p><p>*</p><p>At half-ten the next morning, Rossi found himself a seat in a quiet compartment on a train bound for London. He had risen early to catch the train from Glasgow Central, his pottering around in the near dark waking his siblings up one by one. It was then, and only then, that he told them he was leaving to become a soldier.</p><p>He did so in the kitchen, Carmela perched on his knee. Maria, who had taken a keen interest in the tommies marching and lingering around town, was particularly enamoured by the idea and beamed with pride. Less enthusiastic, Linda seemed more interested in how many Huns he was going to kill, and if he was going to get to ride a horse. Carmela did not seem to understand what was going on, only that he was leaving, and that upset her greatly, which upset Gianni, who sobbed himself sick and screamed the street awake.</p><p>He received a round of wet kisses before he left.</p><p>In the third-class compartment, a dishevelled woman had joined him and an old man with her brood of five children. He helped her put a few small suitcases in the overhead but kept his own bag of belongings in his lap. He had not known what to take, what he might miss or what he might want. In fact, the only truly sentimental thing he had taken, which often lived in a drawer of the sideboard, was a small carved wood statue of the Virgin Mother that his father had made.</p><p>He took the statue from his bag and held it tight in his hand.</p><p>As the story went, Sabato and Umberto Rossi, his father and uncle, had left the small village of Tramutola by mule one day, intent on heading to America, but ending up in Scotland instead. It was there, each of them just seventeen years old, that his father met his mother. Ten months after they met and seven months after they were married, their first son Adelino was born. As an extra income, Sabato would make and sell the little wooden statues of the Virgin to the newly arriving Irish Catholics for a penny apiece.</p><p>But he stopped when Adelino died, and his name became a blasphemy.</p><p>It was an accident if rumour served to be true. Whatever it had been, it brought great shame upon his parents—at least, he assumed it did. They never spoke of Adelino as they did of Mattia, who had been born early with a bad heart, or Beatrice, who died of whooping cough. The only trace of him that remained was on the underside of the last surviving statue, where “LINO” had been engraved into the wood.</p><p>As the replacement baby, Rossi had often wondered why he felt such a loss for someone he had never met. Turning the statue in his hand, he wondered what it would have been like to be someone else’s little brother.</p><p>He put it back safely in his bag.</p><p>Between the noise of the children in the carriage and the sway and rumble of the train, it was impossible to get any rest. Still, he leant his forehead on the edge of the window and watched the sickly grey of the city become the magnificent green of the border towns, the low clouds and mist over the hills smudging together on the horizon.</p><p>At Lockerbie, just before they passed into England, Rossi caught one of the children staring at him. He was a boy of around eight whose scabby legs were vigorously kicking backwards and forwards in the narrow space between them.</p><p>“Where are you going?” asked the boy.</p><p>“Albert!”</p><p>“It’s awright,” he said to the mother. “Tae London. Gonna be a soldier, so ah am.”</p><p>Unlike his own siblings, this roused no excitement or curiosity in the children. Instead, they glanced among themselves, their small faces twisting at the nose. Rossi flicked his eyes to the mother, who had turned her head towards the window and gripped the smallest of her children tighter around the waist.</p><p>It was that one that said, “Daddy was a soldier.”</p><p>The <em>was</em> did not fully settle in his mind at first; the children, probably English, spoke strangely, pronouncing consonants that his own tongue drowned with vowels. When he did realise, he stopped himself from swearing. War meant death; he was not so naïve as to think otherwise, but the reminder was sobering. He sunk back into the wooden bench as though boneless, a marionette cut from its strings, and let the train jostle him around as they passed over the border into a place he had never been.</p><p>England looked little different from Scotland, though her hills did not rise as close to God.  </p><p>Sometime between Carlisle and Preston, the family got off and were replaced by another. This time it was a portly woman with two grown daughters acting well above their class. One of the daughters complained excessively about the lack of light as she tried to read, the sun slipping behind grey clouds and leaving the feeble gas lighting to fend for itself against the dark. Though their voices were shrill, and the rain had begun to batter the window, he took a knowing sip of brandy from the bottle the old man offered him and forced his eyes shut.</p><p>He did not sleep well. He never did. His dreams changed with the sunlight that made it through the clouds, bursting through with the unconscious flutter of his eyelashes when the train jolted him forward and back. He grumbled, nestling into the bunnet he was using as a pillow, wondering how longer it would take.  </p><p>As it was, it took near enough ten hours.</p><p>By the time Rossi had stepped onto the platform of London Euston, he had nibbled through all his dry biscuits and the sky had gone dark. Even still, London continued to thrum with a strange life; like Glasgow, he thought, but with bigger lungs that did not rattle.</p><p>But he had no time to stop and marvel, for next he was off to Waterloo.</p><p>*</p><p>It wasn’t just about the money.</p><p>There was some sense of escape about it, some sense of duty. Father Macdonough had spoken of the grave evil of war spreading through the continent during Mass, and how it was most likely a punishment for man’s greatest sin: denying his Creator. The most enlightened was the most irreligious age, he had said, and then the judgement came.</p><p>And now was their day of judgement.  </p><p>They had to fight. Anyone that neglected to fight faced the risk of violating the cardinal principle of justice and be found guilty in the eyes of God. There could be no nobler cause than to protect one’s country, protect the <em>world</em>, against ambition, treachery, cruelty, lust and robbery. They especially had to fight, Rossi reasoned, though it was never said, because their emancipation had not brought them peace. They only way to refute charges of their disloyalty was to resort to the established tradition of sacrificing themselves on the battlefield, so they might show their blood ran the same.</p><p>Rossi very much assumed his blood might run, especially after the training officer produced the signalling flags. Sat near the back of a classroom of a school commandeered by the army, comically too big for the seats, he blanched at the sight of them.</p><p>“What kinda suicidal shite is this?” he muttered to the boy beside him. “Might as well huv ‘shoot me, Fritz’ written right oan it, for Jesus’ sake.”</p><p>For his comment, although he assumed it to be what they were all thinking, he was put on cookhouse fatigue. He did not mind much; he had become friendly with the orderlies in the kitchen, where he would spend his time while those of a reformed faith were herded up and sent to observe a service at the local church. Sometimes, if he had been particularly helpful, he was saved a cheese piece that he mostly declined. So unaccustomed to a proper feeding, he often found three square meals a day made his stomach hurt.</p><p>He informed his mother of as much, addressing his letters to her though she herself could not read or write. He received her replies in Maria’s girlish hand, though the words remained hers.</p><p>Such was the distance between Wiltshire and Glasgow, home visits were logistically impossible. He did, however, organise his mother to come down for a visit around Christmas time, though both she and he fretted over her travelling down to London by herself. She was a hardy woman of good Glaswegian stock, though, and she made it down well enough, wrapped up in her best coat and clutching a purse rarely seen. One that had been her mother’s, no doubt.</p><p>“Look at ye,” she said, holding his face in her hands. “Look how handsome ye are, Giacomo.”</p><p>To escape the cold, they took refuge in a small, darkened tearoom that had upturned barrels covered in floral cloth for tables. Inside, although most likely starving from the overnight journey, his mother dithered over his offer of buying her a cake until one of the waitresses insisted that he need not pay. He nervously fiddled with the buttons of his khaki jacket as he thanked her and ordered fruit crumpets with their tea.</p><p>“How’re the wee yins?” he asked.</p><p>“Missin’ ye somethin’ awful, so they are,” she told him. “Carmela’s taken to sleepin’ in yer bed.”</p><p>Rossi shifted in his seat, swallowing down his guilt as he remembered taking one last look at her little face before he left, cheeks stinging red from her crying. It was much easier to live with, knowing he had caused it, if he didn’t think about it too much.</p><p>“Ah’d come back, but—”</p><p>He frowned.</p><p>She nodded, quiet and knowing.</p><p>Ever since he had enlisted, she had uttered no word of accusation on his decision or questioned his reasons as for why. As of then, he could only imagine what it was that she thought. Perhaps she felt scared, unsettled, betrayed. She had sacrificed so much, thought of herself so little, only for him to turn around and run at the death she had sheltered him from. What a waste, she must have thought. What a bloody waste.</p><p>Hauling their conversation back to safer ground, Rossi listened to his mother’s gossip that he might not have entertained otherwise, letting it snuff out the Morse code and military jargon that had infested his brain like lice. He lit a cigarette and reclined, laughing along to familiar stories with familiar names, a small slice of home carved into his new existence. He was particularly pleased to hear that the money, both that was deducted from his pay and supplemented by the government, had found its way to her well.</p><p>It wasn’t just about the money, but it was mainly so.</p><p>When time came to say goodbye and return to the barracks, he walked his mother back to the station and stood with her as she waited for the train to come in. Around them, people moved in their masses. The locomotives shook the rafters. One day soon he would pray for such peace, but it wrung in his ear for now.</p><p>“If ah don’t see ye—” he began, then stopped.</p><p>She reached out and touched his cheek, thumb tracing the bone. Beside them, the train came in and the passengers disembarked, jostling them closer.</p><p>“We survive, oor lot,” she told him. “Ye just need tae be a wee bit scared, or Hell slap it intae ye.”</p><p>*</p><p>Winter gave way to spring, and spring gave way to a strange summer.</p><p>It was hot. Rossi could feel it beat down on the back of his neck as he sat in a field, picking first at the blisters the flags had left on his palms, and then at the tiny flowers that surrounded him. It was just little weedy things mostly; daisies with too-thin stalks to make chains and buttercups that opened to the sun. This time last year he’d had them shoved beneath his chin as Linda proudly proclaimed that he, like the rest of them, loved butter.</p><p>Twirling the little flower between his thumb and forefinger, he looked over his shoulder towards the garrison church. A steel-framed little building reinforced by concrete and flint stone walls, St. Patrick’s did not seem entirely adequate in reflecting the Lord’s glory, but it was better than nothing.</p><p>Sighing, he stood and bade farewell to the other boys unable to take their last leave home. He crossed the narrow road to the church and stepped inside.</p><p>From within, it was no grander. The aisle roofs were painted black and supported on shallow-arched timber braces, while the walls and columns were painted white. By the altar, the chancel arch was pointed and cut away in a symmetrical slope. Some of the windows were plain, others of stained glass. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian dominated those that were, his face eerily peaceful despite the arrows that littered his body and the rope that bound his hands and feet.</p><p>Peaceful were those that died a holy death, he supposed.</p><p>After genuflecting, he took a seat in the pew and tried to pray for the same, but because he could not help it, he thought of the war instead.</p><p>It should have been over by then, but still it loomed large on the horizon, whispers of its horrors spreading through the barracks like wildfire but exterminated like rats to keep them ignorant. Little could be worked from the officers, and the newspaper articles were flimsy, patriotic nonsense at best. Rossi had all but given up on reading them, saving up his pennies for fags instead and smoking them with increasing regularity.</p><p>With the photographers came speculation of their imminent departure. Rossi had paid it no mind as he sat up straight, displaying the crossed flags of a first-class signaller on his sleeve. When he stood, he flipped off the boys that had been wolf-whistling and shouting, “looking gorgeous, Jackie boy,” but did the same to them as they sat. For his mother he ordered a postcard-sized photograph but did not warn her of its significance in his next letter home.</p><p>Nor did he tell her of his last leave.</p><p>This time it was not solely the logistics that stopped him going home, but his own heavy heart. If he went now, he did not trust himself to come back. Hands white-knuckled on the back of the pew in front, he did not know how he could leave them again.</p><p>A moment later, he was distracted from his thoughts by overlapping voice.</p><p>Standing in the nave was a group of people, accompanied by the parish priest. It was not the language they spoke that Rossi found particularly interesting—he assumed French, or whatever the Belgians spoke—but because one of them, an elderly lady, was standing in her night clothes. It would not be until later, as he stood outside again with a cigarette, that Father Brady would tell him the story of how she had been driven from her bed by German soldiers just two nights before, and had not had time to change.</p><p>“Bastards,” he had muttered, stomach burning hot like the ash he flicked to the ground.</p><p>Short and bittersweet, they returned to their barracks and slipped back into routine, knowing any day soon they would hand back their spare uniform and receive their sailing orders for France.</p><p>Crawling onto his mattress of straw after a late-night training with the Lucas lamps, Rossi clutched his blanket to his chest and stared at the ceiling above. In the corner, a small spider’s efforts of spinning a web were illuminated by candlelight and keeping him occupied. When it failed, a strange heaviness settled on his rib cage like he was being compressed to dust. He laid a hand on his breast, feeling his heart thunder as his breath caught itself in his throat and made him choke.</p><p>He sat up quickly, shoulders heaving, and pushed a hand through his sweat-damp hair.</p><p>“Christ,” he breathed, and turned his head to where Adelino’s statue was sat atop his signalling books and jotters, the Virgin Mary watching over him. He took it and held it to his chest like a child might do a toy as he settled down again. “Fucking Hell.”</p><p>Some twenty-odd years old now, it had lost much of its detail, but in the dark Rossi could still feel the ridge of the Virgin’s nose as he ran his thumb across it, the small grooves in Her cheeks where tears were permanently stained. He thought of his own mother. He wondered if her sorrow would be the same, or if she had already been resigned to losing him. Perhaps, though he liked to think otherwise, he had already borne witness to her silent mourning, and to her he was but an awaiting ghost.</p><p>He closed his eyes, nuzzled his cheek into his pillow and slept away his last night in England.</p><p>*</p><p>Aboard the troopship headed for France, Rossi watched the white-feathered waves rise on the black-green sea. Under his breath he hummed Jacobite lullabies to the wind as his mother had done to him, rocking him as the boat did.</p><p>A large, cumbersome ocean liner, the RMS Aquitania had been registered in Liverpool to sail across the Atlantic to New York, but it had been built on the Clyde. Though not made by the company his father had worked for, he stood along the starboard deck and imagined its bones formed by his hands in the foundry, likely with no thought that it might one day carry his son to war. As it was, the only thing steelier than Scotland’s ships were her soldiers.</p><p>He imagined, too, what his father must have felt travelling the other way, over from the continent to what he prayed might be something better.</p><p>Had it been?</p><p>His father had never said it in as many words, but certainly he had loved his mother enough to stay in Glasgow, if not the city itself. Even then, he had been a silent man who worked hard, sat his daughters on his knee while he ate his dinner and went to bed to get up early the next morning until one day he didn’t.</p><p>“Will you get that thing on a bloody leash!” came a voice from behind him.</p><p>Shaking his head free of thoughts of his father, Rossi turned around to see a man, fair-haired with a neat moustache, chasing a small, white dog around deck. Around them, men cheered as the dog happily skipped off whenever he got close. A terrier of sorts, it seemed very unlike the messenger dogs in the Signals Section that never strayed too far from their handlers. Once bitten by a dog in the backcourt as a child—likely his own fault, he now thought—he mostly kept himself clear of them.</p><p>But now, the little dog was coming towards him.</p><p>On instinct, he knelt by his pack to meet it. A pair of dark, deep-set eyes took him in before it pushed its short muzzle into his hand. He scratched between its pointed ears.</p><p>“Jip, you little rat,” panted the man that came to a stop beside them. Admittedly, there was something quite rodent-like about the dog. “What have I told you about running off?”</p><p>“Huv ye tried barkin’ at it? Might unnerstaun better.”</p><p>“Very funny, pal,” the man said. “I’ll let the boys know there’s a comedian onboard.”</p><p>Slightly more docile then, the man picked up the dog. It wriggled a little, but soon settled where he held it to his chest like an infant. From his uniform, Rossi could tell he was a private. There was green patch stitched to his shoulder, but he could not see what it read. If they ever crossed paths on morning marches back in England, he did not remember seeing him.</p><p>“Here, are you one of them iddy-umpties?” he asked.</p><p>Iddy, as his brain had become accustomed to, was dot, and umpty was dash. In his head it now made perfect sense, but he knew, from the outside, their gibberish amongst themselves might have seemed strange. Especially since rarely did signallers separate from each other, speaking their own private language on the outskirts of everyone else. Some might call it clannish, but it was a camaraderie he enjoyed.</p><p>“Aye,” he said.</p><p>He hummed, on the face of it neither indifferent nor impressed.  </p><p>“Whit’s yon—What’s the dug for?” he asked, remembering this time to sanitize his words. “He’s no one of oors.”</p><p>“Some old dear gave us him as a mascot or something,” he said. “Says he catches rats.”</p><p>“By kiddin’ on he’s faimilie?” he joked and reached out to give him another quick scratch behind the ear. “Only kiddin’, wee man.”</p><p>On the sea, the ship shifted on the waves and morning had begun to open over the horizon. It was said, on a clear day, you could see home from where you would disembark on the French coast. Rossi would amend, though, that you could only see England, not home. Home was much, much further away than that.</p><p>Rossi leaned against the railing, watching the skyline of Le Havre sharpen into focus. The other men lingering on the deck wandered over to look as well. The little dog yapped. In the port sat a hospital ship.</p><p>“Reckon the wine and women are as dangerous as Kitchener says?” someone asked.</p><p>To which someone else replied, “I bloody well hope so.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. but man is a soger, and life is a faught</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Beneath his laden pack, Rossi could feel himself sweat.</p><p>The moisture on his skin awakened an itch against the fabric of his collar and cuff, the friction rubbing it redder and rawer with each step that he took. As he listened to the marching songs of the men before him, he looked down at his feet, a small bead of sweat dripping from the tip of his nose to the ground. He focused on moving forward.</p><p>They were billeted in a small, rather indistinguishable village, somewhere northwest of Saint-Omer. It sat, for the most part, along a narrow street flanked with piles of hay that opened out onto a more serviceable road. At the very east end of the village was a cathedral of his own faith, its spires rising on the horizon over the ridge like arms offered up to God. Packed tightly into a farmhouse, Rossi could see them from where he slept under the window at night, homesickness diluting his nerves.</p><p>Behind the cathedral was a grassy field. Once used for grazing, it had been turned into a football pitch with branches for goalposts and a thick, constantly dipping length of rope for a crossbar. On the side, scores were kept on a slate board taken from an abandoned school classroom.</p><p>After a brief trip to the Signal Depot, finally shed of his jacket, Rossi went to the field to play. The sun was still clinging to the sky over the hill by then, but the heat was no longer oppressive. Though his legs were stiff and aching from hours of marching, he found a team of Scots—mostly miners by trade, belonging to the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers—and made their numbers up to ten.</p><p>Or eight if you did not count the completely inebriated.</p><p>On the board, they allowed themselves to be denoted as <em>Jocks</em> if their counterparts would be <em>Sassenachs, </em>though they themselves came from no further north than Port Glasgow. They kept the score to a respectable four-three.</p><p>At breakfast the following morning he sat with two of the younger lads, McKinnon and Lewis, who seemed to have crawled from their cradles to the coal pits. Together the three of them spoke of anything but home, not even begrudging the lack of rain as their skin peeled and blistered under the sun. It wasn’t like it would fall the same here anyway, Rossi thought as he softened his biscuits in something that resembled tea. He doubted no rain seared against skin the way it did back home.</p><p>“Ah jist hope we finish this o’er here,” McKinnon said.</p><p>“How?” Rossi asked.</p><p>“Cause,” he said, “ye’ve seen how close we’re to there. Straight shot o’er the watter, it is.”</p><p>Behind them, a round of practice shots were fired on an officer’s command. Rossi had heard a regimental sergeant complaining of the sappers’ shoddy gunmanship and demanded they do more training. Perhaps it was true. McKinnon and Lewis had been down a pit in Hamilton not four weeks ago. He himself was competent at best.</p><p>“Better hope we blow ‘em aw tae Hell then,” Lewis chimed in.</p><p>Rossi and McKinnon raised their cups of tea to that.</p><p>As instructed the previous day, Rossi headed back to the Signal Depot after breakfast. On his way to the clerk’s office that acted as their base, he passed a group of soldiers by some tents; some of them were shaving, others transcribing letters for those that could not write.</p><p>He had not yet written to his own mother, but only because he had nothing to say to her. War, as he was beginning to find, was a rather dull affair full of strange silences and waiting. It had certainly seemed more glamorous on the posters, he thought as he stepped up onto the porch of the clerk’s office and leaned against the pillar by a growing bunch of other men. His legs still ached from the day before. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down, trying to forget. </p><p>They were eventually given their postings, called from a sheet, by some spindly-framed captain with a scar on his chin and a Welsh accent. As it was, he was posted to the 57<sup>th</sup> Infantry Brigade. With him was a boy, Christopher Darling, that he recognised from training. A quiet, Oxbridge-educated type, he had mostly kept to himself and his books at the barracks, but Rossi knew that he had spent a few years as a child in Vienna, leaving him with a proficient understanding of German. Standing beside each other outside the clerk’s office, he shook Darling’s hand.</p><p>“Pleasure,” he said.</p><p>“Likewise.”</p><p>*</p><p>Packed into the back of a cattle truck, Rossi could not sleep.</p><p>It was self-preservation mostly. Sat precariously by the edge, he was a small bump in the road away from being thrown in front of the next oncoming vehicle, the headlights of which shone on them dimly but directly when the road straightened out. Far from being a nuisance, Darling was taking advantage of the light to read a paperback book he had scavenged from the village. Though it lacked the first couple of pages, he did not seem to mind.</p><p>“Any’hing good?” he asked.</p><p>Darling looked up at him. He had pale, tired eyes and a slight wave to his hair, shoddily cropped at the sides by a lady barber in the village. Above his lip was the beginnings of a pitiful moustache. He could not have been more than nineteen.</p><p>“A bit tragic, if I’m honest,” he said. He looked outside. It was just fields for as far as they could see. “Fitting, though.”</p><p>Rossi hummed.</p><p>He did not like to read. It had been the bane of his existence at school to stand up and read in class, the words never looking the way they existed in his tongue and mind. While he was literate—by the council’s standards, generously receiving his Merit Certificate at thirteen to prove it—to think words could be collected together to make something greater than the sum of themselves seemed very strange to him. It was like they did not exist in the real world, unmoving, stuck in their time and place. His mother had never told a story the same way twice.  </p><p>He tilted his head back against the canvas sheet that covered them.</p><p>“Cheer up,” he said, “it’ll be o’er any year now.”</p><p>It was a joke—and it even made Darling smile—but the humour drained itself away when the reality set in. Carmela would be starting school any day now, he thought. Gianni would be turning four at the end of August and Maria fifteen in September. If they did not return home by Christmas, he would miss another of Elisa’s birthdays.</p><p>“With any luck,” Darling said and returned to his book.</p><p>By the time dawn broke, they were not far from their new billets. Starving, some men jumped from the truck to grab apples, not yet entirely ripe, from trees they passed. Taking advantage of the space, Rossi shuffled himself up and pillowed his head on the shoulder of another sleeping soldier. He closed his eyes against the raucous of them trying to climb back in and slept the rest of the way.</p><p>A small industrial town built along its manmade waters, Merville seemed to Rossi closer to home than any field or village they had travelled through. Surrounded by practice trenches, it sat bleached in dust and debris, with very little sign of civilian life remaining. In its place were temporary huts and tents, make-do stables for horses and soldiers spread out on every inch of grass, hanging on every corner, perched on every wall.</p><p>Most of them were sepoys and sowars, he noticed as he and another signaller, Bainbridge, were unloading a wagon.</p><p>“Fair play,” Bainbridge said to him, “I wouldn’t have come all this bloody way if I were ‘em.”</p><p>All of what Rossi knew of India, besides where it was on a map, had been filtered down to him through Martin’s incessant, lager-fuelled rants about capitalism and imperialism and the unquestionable relationship between both. The war had not derailed his argument but diverted it. To him, there was a certain absurdity to the situation; plunderers versus plunderers, neither with conscience nor morality, the propertied classes of each leading the working classes like donkeys might lead lions. </p><p>And for what?</p><p>Looking around, Rossi was not sure he knew.</p><p>After they were done unloading their equipment, they reported to their new Signal Officer, Captain Francis Cairney. A short, mournful-looking man in his early thirties, he was a Glaswegian by birth but had long since lost the accent after years of work and education down south. It would not be too long before the other boys jokingly referred to Cairney as his father.</p><p>“He seems pleasant enough,” Darling said as they headed towards the building in which they had been billeted.</p><p>Rossi and Bainbridge each made a noise of agreement.</p><p>As soon as they had exited Cairney’s office, they had unbuttoned their shirts and undone their tunics. Rossi took his all the way off and carried it over his arm though the wool weighed heavy on his tired limbs. Turning his face to the sun as he walked, it seemed to get no less oppressive until well into the evening when it finally fell beyond the horizon.</p><p>Sold as a room by Cairney, their billet turned out to be a dusty old attic with a pitched roof window. They each threw their packs up into it before climbing the ladder one after the other. The first up, Bainbridge took the last place beside the wall, leaving the other two to collect a blanket from the heap and lay it out side-by-side in the middle of the floor.</p><p>“Naebody better step oan me,” Rossi warned, throwing his forearm over his eyes as he settled on his back for the night.</p><p>*</p><p>In Festubert, Our Lady stood imperious against man’s carnage.</p><p>It sat to the north of the town, along the Rue de Lille. Around the church buildings crumbled, carved and cracked open like the skulls that jutted from the dry ground. Rossi tried to avoid them, tried to be respectful, but such was their frequency it became impossible. Behind him he heard Darling say, “Is that a—” so often that he stopped answering, stopped looking.</p><p>Far behind the line, they walked to the eastern edge of the town. Most, if not all, of the communication lines laid down before had been removed or destroyed during the spring. They laid down a new telephone wire by an old signal base, choosing instead to wind it up the carcass of a building, the entire east face of it lying it what once might have been a garden. Though the entirety of it creaked with a warning, it seemed favourable to being entirely exposed on the ground.</p><p>For a time, Rossi tried making visual communication with the Worcestershires, but he abandoned his attempts early into the evening. He reckoned his time would be better spent trying to get a cat to bark.</p><p>Crouched by a small flame, he kept himself busy making tea.</p><p>“<em>Ham an’ eggs they never see</em>,” he sang under his breath, the voice of his mother resonating around in his mind, “<em>dirty watter fur yer tea</em>.” He split the petrol-tinged water between two cups, pot burning the tips of his fingers. “<em>There they live in misery. God save the fucking Queen</em>.”</p><p>Upstairs, Darling was manning the telephone. He sat in front of it with his legs crossed, childlike and hunched, with a thumb slowly circling into his temple as he took a break from turning the handles. Rossi could hear its strange static from where he sat himself down beside him, messages not intended for them seeping through. None in German yet, though, which was what they thought Cairney had really sent them out here to do.</p><p>No doubt soon they would get orders to advance forward.</p><p>“It’s busier than usual—thank you,” Darling told him as he took his tea. “I can’t get a clear listen of anything.”</p><p>“We must be no far aff a big push,” Rossi said. He turned his body to rest his back against the wall. “Cairney says they’re spreading the boys oot tae fuck,” he continued, spreading his arms to illustrate the point. “Lots o’ Scots as well.”</p><p>“I thought I heard a terrible racket during the night,” Darling said. “Must have been the bagpipes.”</p><p>Rossi pinched a bit of tobacco in his fingers and threw it at Darling.</p><p>“Don’t be cheeky,” he said.</p><p>Darling brushed the little tendrils of tobacco from the front of his tunic, body humming with a gentle undercurrent of laughter. He was a nice lad, Rossi had concluded, and someone he had plenty of time for. Sometimes he found him a little strange, but they had existed in different worlds until war had thrown them together, lived like different characters in different books on the same shelf all their lives. He could only imagine Daring found him just as odd.</p><p>“Only joking,” he said, setting the receiver down into the box. “With your lot we’re bound to win.”</p><p>“Too right we are,” Rossi said, packing the tobacco into the rolling skin.</p><p>There was a beat of silence.</p><p>“Horrible, isn’t it?” Darling said.</p><p>He was looking out over the battlefield beyond them.</p><p>Unlike some places they had passed through, this one had not yet returned to nature. Everywhere what man had done to the land protruded like a broken bone. It would, God willing, heal over in time on its own, but that wasn’t to say they were done with it. The more Rossi sat waiting, shots ringing in the distance and overhead, the more he was purged of the idea that this would be over anytime soon.</p><p>Darling did not believe as much. He thought they would dig in over the winter and win the war in the spring with the big guns. He had an optimism despite his sad eyes, one someone like Rossi could never be afforded. It would disrupt the way of things too much.</p><p>Maybe Martin had a point.</p><p>“Whit ye—what you gonna do when you go home?” he asked then, more so for Darling’s benefit than out of any interest of his own.</p><p>“Have a good hot bath—and good food in good company, of course,” he said. “Not that our bread and jam dinners aren’t the highlight of my day.”</p><p>“Ah should fuckin’ hope so.”</p><p>They both laughed. Somewhere in the distance, sniper fire whistled and cracked. Bloody Huns, he thought, it wasn’t even night-time yet. Couldn’t they ever take a day off? He sighed into the side of his cigarette and added it to the pile already growing in his tin. He supposed that would be too much to ask.</p><p>When they were eventually relieved of their post, some three hours later, they hitched a ride on a limber heading back to Locon from the reserve line. Rossi lit one of his newly rolled cigarettes and let the smoke obscure the ruins like a terrible dream until they finally disappeared in the distance. Only then did he let his shoulder fall against Darling’s, who had taken to scribbling down in a tiny notebook that lived in his breast pocket. They weren’t supposed to keep diaries, but no one paid much mind to those that did.</p><p>Veering slightly off the path, the limber rounded a shell hole, throwing Darling’s weight against his. Ash from his cigarette floated down between them, fizzing and dying in the open pages of his notebook. Rossi muttered an apology that he dismissed.</p><p>“When aw this is o’er, are you gonna tell folk about it?” he asked.</p><p>Darling did not answer for a moment. Closing his notebook, he tucked it back safely into his pocket and turned to Rossi.</p><p>“I think forgetting would be a greater tragedy than this.”</p><p>*</p><p>With September came the rain. It seemed an appropriate change in circumstance as any to write to his mother.</p><p>
  <em>20 September 1915</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Mother,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Just writing to let you know all is well over here. I am being kept adequately fattened as I am sure you would be glad to hear. Summer seems to have lasted years but finally the rain has come and I am reminded of home. As you will be aware, our boys are the very best and raring to go while the weather is useful. I imagine the winter will be tedious. I hope my absence has brought you no burden. God willing, I will be home before long.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Give my love to Gianni and the girls.  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>— Giacomo</em>
</p><p>It seemed sterile, but he handed it off to be sent regardless.</p><p>In the meantime, Darling had received some spiced currant buns from home. He shared them amongst the brigade’s signallers, who each ate theirs gladly. Rossi was just glad of the change from the congealed eggs he received upon returning from his post in the dugout by the reserve line.</p><p>Cairney was insistent on keeping their high spirits for the time being. He seemed to favour being well liked over well feared, although there were rumours that came from the Advanced Signals that he had sat in on a court-martial that saw a private executed for desertion. Rossi chose not to believe it, but guilt might have explained his leniency. He was certainly not going to complain when he smuggled some good rum from the officer’s mess into their billet. Even Darling, bound by a strong Protestant ethic, drank down a generous inch.</p><p>In their newest billet, Darling slept above him. The wire netting dipped under his weight. As they had become as nocturnal as bats, it was still bright outside, the rain clouds making it bearable. On the next bunk along, Bainbridge, Sinclair and Jones were up playing cards. Rossi turned under his blanket.</p><p>A few hours before, he had gone to the church in the centre of town.</p><p>Or, more accurately, what was left of one.</p><p>The side had been demolished and the doors splintered. Stained glass lay in the dirt like funeral flowers around it. All that was precious inside had been taken and moved for safekeeping. When all this was over, a barber in the town had told him, it would be built from the ground again. It seemed impossible as he sat on the step before the alter, knees to his chest. Nature could recover itself from this pity, but could man? Could man have faith after this?</p><p>Rossi clasped his hands and crossed his thumbs. He pressed his lips to them. It was something his father would do when deep in thought.</p><p>Above him, he felt Darling move. He was usually quite good at sleeping like a dead man, but these last few nights he had been restless. Cairney had told them to make the most of their billets, however shite they might be—Rossi’s commentary, not his—as they would soon be moving southeast and bivouacking in some plough fields. He reached up and poked him through the mesh.</p><p>“Here—read us somethin’,” he said.  </p><p>“Jesus, Rossi,” Jones was saying before Darling could respond, “have you gone fruity?”</p><p>“Shut it,” Rossi said. “Just ‘cause you cannae read.”</p><p>“Oi!”</p><p>“It’s George Eliot, is that alright?” Darling asked.</p><p>“Aye, crackin’,” Rossi said, entertained that not only did Darling think he knew who that was, but that he had a preference either way. Giving Jones the finger, he pulled his blanket back over his shoulder and tucked himself up smaller. “Fire away.”</p><p>Darling read. Rossi listened. He focused less on what he was being told and more so on the way Darling telling it. It was like he was speaking these people into existence or throwing dreams out into the world, the illusion only beginning to falter when his speech did, clipped by his yawning. Rossi almost did not want him to stop, but did nothing when he did, voice trailing off into a quiet mumble as the tell-tale sound of pages slipping through fingers filled the quiet room.</p><p>“Night, pal,” he muttered, and he too fell asleep.</p><p>*</p><p>They made post in a half-dug excavation.</p><p>It had probably been left behind by Germans, Darling had commented as he carefully assembled sandbags around them and Rossi made half an effort of laying duckboards. The weather had turned dreadfully and the ground was sodden. Up on the parapet was the telescope and heliograph, shielded from the elements by a roof of tin sheets and barbed wire. They alternated between who manned what, but Rossi would not deny that Darling processed incoming messages much quicker than he did.</p><p>For the most part, as they had become accustomed, they waited. Rossi smoked and Darling wrote. They received messages from their brigade and divisional headquarters. The constant bombardment in the distance did not bother them.</p><p>And then everything quietened.</p><p>“I don’t like this,” Darling said after a few hours of it. “Rossi, I don’t like this at all—”</p><p>“Will you keep the heid,” he said and rose onto his knees. It was dark. A mist hung low. It reminded him of the smog that blanketed Glasgow, still packed against his lungs as he breathed. He turned back to Darling. “They’re probably just savin’ shells for themorra.”     </p><p>Darling nodded, not looking all that convinced.</p><p>And then, the next day, they watched the bodies.</p><p>They came like a stream of blood running from the east. Endless, choking and bloodied, they staggered and carried forward in an innate march from the carnage and clouds of gas they left behind. From morning to noon to evening they came, travelling along the near horizon that dipped with the canal and disappeared north towards Locon. It was not lost on Rossi how many of them wore kilts.</p><p>The noise, from such a distance, was somewhat muted, but they could feel it. Feel it in the cold ground as it moved with a new rally of bombardments, shaking them to their bones unlike before. From an upturned box, Rossi’s statue of the Virgin Mother was almost rattled over the edge as France shook.</p><p>“Christ,” Rossi breathed, falling back from the telescope he was handling. He lit a cigarette. “Jesus fucking Christ.”</p><p>Beside him, Darling sat by the heliograph with his hand over his mouth as if about to be sick. They had not long since passed on a message to send two of their brigade’s battalions—the Warwickshire lot, followed by the 10<sup>th</sup> Worcestershires—on towards the line, if not all the way to the front this side of the canal. “Gracious madam,” he had muttered, fingertips clawing down his face, “I that do bring the news made not the match.”</p><p>Rossi pulled his cigarette from his mouth.</p><p>“What’s that supposed tae mean?”</p><p>Darling looked at him, all sad, young eyes, and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”</p><p>The sky had darkened by then, rainclouds thick and heavy overhead. Dreich, they called it back home, like misery in the air. It was as if Death himself had made an appearance, come to collect all the men that ran to him.</p><p>It was Sinclair, though, that ran to them.</p><p>“Call them back!” he shouted as he ran, head ducked. He threw himself down into the pit behind them. “Everyone—get them all back. You two as well. Direct orders from General Haig. We’re fucked this side. They’re cutting us down.”</p><p>“What—”</p><p>“They’ve to—go back to—to Gorre,” Sinclair continued, panting. “Jesus, you lads came out fucking far.”</p><p>Stirred into action, Rossi and Darling rose to the parapet and immediately began trying to establish visual communication with the slightly more advanced Warwickshire Regiment. Despite twitchy fingers, they did so with ease, barely a tree or building left standing between them to obscure the dots and dashes of light. Not even the Germans seemed to pay them any notice. Maybe they’re easing off, he thought.</p><p>Or, God forbid, maybe they just felt sorry for them.</p><p>The Worcestershire Regiment too responded quickly to their signals, probably anticipating a message. They had barely been in the bivouac that morning before they were ordered to move on, heavy-lidded and generally quite pissed. Through the telescope Rossi could already see them begin to order themselves for the march back.</p><p>They must have seen the bodies too Rossi thought as he scooted back into the excavation. Back against one side, feet up against the other, he rubbed his hands over his face.</p><p>Such was their proximity—six, maybe seven kilometres away—it did not take long for them to reach the signals post. Their excavation sat just off the road the regiment were travelling back along, no spirit in their march for an impending fight. Only dinner awaited them now. Rossi paused in packing their equipment away to watch them pass by.</p><p>“Anywhere else you want to bloody send us?” one of the men shouted over. “Got a little round-trip of Northern France booked for us tomorrow?”</p><p>Rossi did not care to dignify that with an answer. Neither did Darling, who stood behind him in a tense silence. Sinclair wanted to say something, Rossi could tell in the twitch of his fists, but he held it back. He knew better than they did.</p><p>Rossi reached out and touched Sinclair’s shoulder, urging him to turn back around.</p><p>“They should be thanking God they didn’t go,” Sinclair said, just as it started to rain. It made an awful noise as it hit their new steel helmets. “You should’ve heard what HQ was getting in. The gas was fucked, the mines were fucked, the ground was fucked. The shelling didn’t even break through the bloody wire. That’s the last time we help the French out, I tell you.”</p><p>They travelled the short distance back the bivouac behind their brigade and ate dinner in a large mess tent. Tunic and boots soaked, Rossi only ate his stew to warm himself up from the inside. It only succeeded in making him feel sick. Beside him, Darling buzzed with a strange energy—although maybe he too was just freezing.</p><p>It was not like he could not get a word out of him to tell.</p><p>It was the early hours of the morning before they finally returned to Locon, its streets now like makeshift hospital wards. Rossi, who had acquired Darling’s rifle somewhere along the way, volunteering to take it as he struggled, almost joined them on the pavement after freeing himself of the load he carried in the signal store. Instead, he sunk down on the front step of his billet and rested his temple against the wall, feeling every inch a spectator, like he was watching the entire thing on film.</p><p>“Long day?”</p><p>Rossi looked up. It was the fella with the moustache and dog from the boat. He was caked in mud from midriff to boots.</p><p>Some confusion in the camp had left them stuck in a reserve trench for a few hours too many. Rossi did not think it was their fault, but Captain Beaufoy had certainly given Cairney an earful outside the officer’s mess. If nothing else, it had been entertaining to watch him pretend to listen as Bainbridge, back from running a message, bade for some captain-on-captain violence from the side-lines.</p><p>“Aye, you an aw?”</p><p>“Could say,” he said and joined him on the step. “You got a fag?”</p><p>Rossi fished out his tin of cigarettes from his pocket, plucked one out and handed it over without a word. He lit it, then one for himself, and watched the smoke dance skywards. There was a constant, low murmur of pain in the air that Rossi tried his best to ignore. The other soldier seemed happy to do the same.</p><p>Until it hit him.</p><p>“Where’s the wee dug?” he asked.</p><p>“Oh,” he said around his cigarette, “that little bastard. He abandoned us for the Knots the minute we got over here.” He paused, mulling over a thought on an exhale. “I think they attract bigger rats.”</p><p>Rossi nodded through a laugh, thinking it plausible.</p><p>He was going to introduce himself then—wondering as he always did whether to lead with <em>Giacomo</em> or <em>Jackie</em>—when he was distracted by the distant drone of pipes. He leaned forward and looked down the street, towards where the fields gave way to farmhouses, to see a small group of soldiers—not a regiment, not even a company, but what might have been left of one—walking down the road. Their kilts, patterned with blood and mud, moved heavy against their gory knees.  </p><p>As he watched, Rossi swallowed down a lump in his throat, and the piper played Flooers o’ the Forest.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMrA_O8r9LQl">Flooers o the Forest</a>
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. wander'd mony a weary fit</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sat in the signallers’ dugout, Rossi chewed a mouthful of beans and pork. It was cold, decidedly made of more fat than pork. He swallowed. Wiping his mouth, he passed the tin and fork over to Darling who was perched atop a sandbag, head stooping with the slope of the roof. Nose twitching, he had trained his horror down to mild displeasure as he mixed it around with a <em>squelch</em>.</p><p>“Here—how come yer no an officer?” he asked.</p><p>It was not a secret, at least to him, that junior officers were of a certain sort. Young, middle-class, educated types, they even had the same tidy moustache. Rossi often wondered if it was a requirement of one of those fancy universities, like some sort of dress code, or just a fashion choice he was not privy to. They seemed manufactured from a distance, politicians of tomorrow carved neatly from their public-school days to be doled out to war by politicians of today.</p><p>Darling seemed like them in everything but rank.</p><p>“Believe me,” he said, “it’s my parents’ greatest shame that I’m not. I just—” He paused, playing with his food like a child might do. “I’m hardly a leader of men, am I? You wouldn’t follow me over the top.”</p><p>Rossi paused in his efforts of picking pork fat from his teeth, said, “Ah might do.”</p><p>Despite the cold clouding his breath, a heat found its way to Darling’s cheeks, flaring them a healthy red. To Rossi’s amusement, he ducked his head down and shovelled a forkful of beans and pork into his mouth with instant regret. His swallow seemed louder than shellfire.  </p><p>Before Rossi could have a proper go, Bainbridge slipped down into the dugout, disturbing the sandbags at the mouth of it. By now they had been in the trenches for a little over a week—the longest their collect division had done so—and it was beginning to catch up with them. Bainbridge especially complained of their long hours and constant running around the trenches when they were trained to do more. In fairness, Rossi did often feel like glorified postman.</p><p>“Do us a favour, Rossi,” he said, scooting over and holding out a small envelope. “Take this so I can get a kip, yeah? I’ll give you ten ciggies.”</p><p>Without much mulling over of the offer, Rossi reached out and took it. He took the letter from the envelope and opened it with a gentle run of his thumb along the edge. It was a short, brief note from Brigadier-General Humphrey addressed to Colonel Hanlon of the 10<sup>th</sup> Worcesters that his request for trench battery ammunition had been denied at this time, but they would be with him “in good time” whatever that meant. It was official business without being urgent.</p><p>Rossi tucked the letter back inside the envelope, then the envelope into his pocket.</p><p>“Gie’s ma fags then,” he said.</p><p>Ten cigarettes richer, Rossi emerged from the dugout. It was freezing. The ground was wet but the rain had long since ceased. Pulling his scarf—kindly donated by the Red Cross—tighter, he did his best to avoid the muddy puddles that formed in the dip in the land.</p><p>It reminded him of the backcourt, of going out as a child in his bare feet to splash in the puddles. The dirt would dry into his skin where the dirty water had streaked down his legs, his school shorts already grubby from the same treatment the day before. For his exploits, he would catch colds regularly, cough himself sick and miss stretches of school, but nothing too serious.</p><p>Nothing that could kill him.</p><p>He was not, as his mother often said of his siblings, a particularly sickly baby. He quickly outgrew the pillow in the drawer that acted as a cot and was coddled in his mother’s arms instead. Hardy on the outside as he was, there was something shaky in his internal foundations because of it. No one ever said it, least of all his father, but he was sure it did. It was like he knew in his soul that her love for him was built on the grief for someone else, and there was nothing he could ever do about it.</p><p>He really must write to his mother again, he thought as he led with his shoulders down the communication trench with practised ease. He really must do that soon.</p><p>The 10<sup>th</sup> Worcestershire Regiment were stationed northwards, closer to Richebourg-l'Avoué than Festubert. They had, as far as Rossi was aware, had a pretty quiet first week in the trenches, and no trouble on the front line but for the Boche’s usual late-evening bombardment that cut through the barbed wire more than anything. Turning down the trench signposted as Wildwood Avenue, he found them milling around, half asleep on the fire step or writing letters while it was dry.</p><p>He approached Butler and Singer, two privates with which he had become acquainted, who were on sentry duty. Butler had been the one he met on the boat.</p><p>“Efternuin, fellas,” he said, voice disturbing those sleeping by his feet. “Your colonel up aboot here?”</p><p>“In the dugout. He’s not long gone in,” Butler told him. “Not more bloody bad news, is it?”</p><p>“Only send me wi’ the bad stuff, pal,” he said, which was not strictly true; really, there just was never much good news to give. “You two take care,” he said and doffed his cap, beginning along the zigzag of trench that led to the officer’s quarters.</p><p>The front-line trenches were in considerably worse nick than those further back. The walls of sandbags seemed to narrow slightly, and whoever had last fixed the telephone wire running underground had made shoddy work of putting back the duckboards. Cairney had said, next time around, they might try them on the walls, but Rossi very much did not believe that to be practical. To him, it seemed likely they would sooner be knocked from the walls than they would be trampled to breakage as they already were.</p><p>When he reached the dugout, he straightened himself up and took the envelope in hand. He knocked and waited until he was called to enter.</p><p>Colonel Hanlon was as all his contemporaries were; older, seasoned, a little out of touch. The years had not aged his face much, but they had tired his spirit. The boys of the battalion had little opinion of him, but a great amount of respect. On a small bookcase behind where he sat, there were books as thick as bread loafs that, by their titles, seemed to have nothing to do with war, but psychology.</p><p>“Sir,” Rossi said in his presence, saluting. “A message from Brigadier-General Humphrey.”</p><p>“A quick response,” said Hanlon, shaking his head. “Never a good sign.”</p><p>Easing up, he handed the envelope off to an orderly who took it to Hanlon. Resignation already set upon his features, there was no change to his demeanour as he read it over and placed it back down on the desk. He clasped his hands over it.</p><p>“Tell me, Private—?”</p><p>“Private Rossi, Sir,” he supplied.</p><p>“Tell me, Private Rossi, which do you think it is: a withholding of resources, or a lack of them?”</p><p>Never usually one to be stuck for words, Rossi felt a cold panic strike down his spine. His eyes flitted first to the Major in the room he did not know, then to the orderlies. None of them offered a rope on which he could catch himself, so he let himself drown in neutral waters.</p><p>“Ah couldnae—I couldn’t possibly say, Sir,” he said.</p><p>Hanlon let out a small hum of amused laughter. He nodded as if he understood; it was not Rossi’s place to pass such a judgement on the state of the army. It probably was not even Hanlon’s. If there was one thing the war had reinforced in his thinking, it was that no matter how high he pulled himself, no matter where he was, there would always be a man above him, and he would always be at their mercy.  </p><p>*</p><p>Back in Locon, they were billeted in a barn full of bunks and makeshift beds. The distinctive smell of <em>animal</em> still hung in the air and the yard was dominated by a large, mucky duck pond.  </p><p>Having had to put all their signalling gear away for safety, they arrived late into the evening. Most of the men had gone into the village to get a drink of terrible French lager or wine, charged at such an extortionate rate that Rossi had decided not to bother. Instead, he settled himself down on the second floor of the barn, slouching with the gable as he used one of Darling’s books to lean against as he wrote a letter to his mother.</p><p>
  <em> 6 November 1915</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Mother,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Just a few lines to let you know I am doing alright. Have just returned to billets from a spell in the dugouts as our boys were manning the trenches. What a blessing to be a signaller it is. We had a wee bit of a time of it but were fortunate in terms of casualties. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>We’ve had a few days of rain this week. There is mud, mud, and more mud, and I think I hate it worse than the cold. I pray for the day the muddy ground freezes over. The billets are not so dry as before but there is a decent enough fire. I have not long received a good scarf from the Red Cross, and I would very much like and look forward to the pawkies you mentioned in your last letter. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>As always, at my most content knowing everything is well at home. Hoping the good health carries into the colder months. I know how bad Maria’s chest gets at this time. Do warn the wee ones not to grow too much in my absence. I will be checking! And please pass on my love to Elisa, Maria, Linda, Carmela and Gianni. I miss them and you with all my heart. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Looking forward to seeing you again soon, God willing. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>— Giacomo</em>
</p><p>Rossi put down his pencil and looked over at Darling. He was rested up on his elbow, cradling his cheek in his palm and watching him with his lips pushed out into a natural pout. Like the Virgin trapped behind stained glass, it seemed he wore a constant expression of sorrow. He pushed his book back towards him.</p><p>Darling lay his hand atop of it.</p><p>They were quiet.</p><p>It was all quiet. Only the snoring of men from downstairs and the distant leap of music from the village kept them from silence. They had grown to mistrust silence. Silence was not a constant, but a reprieve. In any case, Rossi liked to think it gave the dead time to rest. He feared, how loud it was, that it might wake them, and it would no longer just be the bodies disturbed in the decimated churchyard that rose to meet them, their skeletons protruding from the shattered remains of the boxes they had once been buried in.</p><p>In that cemetery in Vieille Chapelle, it had been the closest he had come to being physically sick.</p><p>Darling had not been so visceral in his reaction, but he had whined in his sleep like a dog that night until Rossi shook him awake. He could not bear the sight. He could not bear the sound. Darling had tucked himself to his side and neither of them had said anything of it.</p><p>Rossi reached for his cigarettes and lit one. He let it dangle between his fingers, peering at Darling beyond the smoke.</p><p>“Want a drink?” he asked suddenly.</p><p>Darling sat up but said nothing. It was confirmation enough. Rossi turned to his pack to retrieve the whisky they had not long ago been given as part of their rations. Distilled in Stromness, it had travelled the length of the British Isles to warm their throats and bellies. Darling had already swapped his for a pack of sweet biscuits; Rossi had almost called it sacrilege.</p><p>He took the first drink, passed the flask over and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.</p><p>His father liked his whisky. It was something he often forgot in the interim. It helped him work, helped him tick over, helped him heal. Elisa would complain in a shriek that his bedtime kisses tasted of it and left a smell. It always made him laugh. They were much the same in that it was never for enjoyment, but the antidote to something bigger and beyond their control. He often wondered if the subtle shake to his father’s hands was the reason he stopped making those wooden statuettes, and not Adelino’s death itself.</p><p>Not that he would have dared ask.</p><p>What he did dare to ponder aloud, a few swings of whisky later, was, “How come you joined up?”</p><p>Darling, who was now sat shoulder-to-shoulder with him, shrugged, wool of their jackets scraping against each other. He rolled his head against the wall. Rossi followed the line of his sight down to the book that lay before them. <em>Middlemarch</em>. Darling had been quite amused by his surprise that George Eliot wasn’t actually a bloke.</p><p>“Just doing my bit, I suppose,” he said. “Father said it might make a man of me yet.”</p><p>Rossi ran his thumb over the face of his flask, further distorting the reflection of himself that was spread upon it. Above him, against the roof, he could hear the constant drum of rain. He could feel the whisky sitting in his stomach.</p><p>“Has it?” he asked, turning to Darling.</p><p>Darling was still staring at his book, flattening the bristles of his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He looked up and watched Rossi like he was the axis his world had set itself upon, fixed even as he shuffled himself up straighter, shoulders back. He took his hand away from his mouth and settled it in a fist on his knee.</p><p>“I shouldn’t think it has, no,” he said, all gentle and quiet like usual, low and not the least bit slurred. “Though I suspect we’ll all be better for it in the end.”</p><p>Rossi frowned.</p><p>“How?”</p><p>“Well, maybe not <em>us</em>,” he corrected himself. “Civilization. Perhaps we have been stupid enough to enter into this nonsense, but I doubt we will ever let it happen again. Surely it’s obvious that man is too much a pilgrim to hold onto such foolish patriotism after all this is over.”</p><p>He laughed dismissively as he brought the flask to his lips.</p><p>“You’ve too much faith in folk, pal,” he said into the flask, chest humming with a new dark laughter as he drank. “Cunts willna learn a fuckin’ thing.”</p><p>*</p><p>It was raining auld wives and pike-staves. That was what his mother would have called it, watching the backcourt flood from the kitchen window as the damp worsened. The sky had opened but for God, the rain falling in line with the horizon. Rossi peeled his eyes against its burning sting, nose buried in the sopping folds of his scarf. It was weighing him down.</p><p>Everything seemed to be.</p><p>Atop his shoulder was a wheel of cable. He carried it like he once did a brick hod, the shaky, perilous incline of a ladder replaced by slippery duckboards tracked in mud. He moved over them like ice, ankles turning awkwardly with ever misstep.</p><p>Jones had already fallen over, the mud sealing him to the ground like glue. It had taken two of them to get him out again. So exhausted were they that they had to lean against the trench walls for a moment to catch their breath, the rain pinging against their tin hats and falling like a veil of water just beyond their faces. Though Rossi had not volunteered his services, he had championed them from a distance as he examined the ugly shallow welt that the wheel’s peg had pressed into his palm where he held it.</p><p>He almost allowed himself to feel sorry for himself.</p><p>Instead, eyes on the centre of Cairney’s back, he stumbled along. He knew, if only through the Church, what a debilitating, addictive force self-pity came to be if one let it. Man was born filled with miseries and lived under a vale of tears, in a place of trial, and war brought his suffering to the parapet of existence. But the Redeemer liveth, he could hear Father Macdonough’s voice say, and what skin and flesh of his that war took and ruined would be on his last day returned to him, and then he shall see his Maker.</p><p>Or, at least, he hoped so.</p><p>He hoped, also, that the message they had received from the front was not as bad as first feared. They had certainly heard the crack and boom of the shells that tore up no insignificant length of communication wire, cutting off contact to both brigade and divisional headquarters. It had disturbed the flame of their dugout fire. None of them had been best pleased.</p><p>Even then, on their mournful march to the front, Darling kept a strange affection for their foe. In quiet times Rossi’s thoughts breached tolerance at best. When all of this was over there would be time for contemplation of humankind’s kinship, that all men were brothers scattered across the earth, but in the meantime he cultivated his hatred as a means of keeping himself moving forward. If not, it would only be an exterior momentum driving him along, a flow of men behind his back.</p><p>Darling stood beside him, slowed to a stop by the congestion of bodies ahead of them. Men were arguing with each other. Someone shouted, “Let those bloody buzzers through.”</p><p>It was dark. The night was moonless, the stars lost somewhere beyond the storm clouds. The sound of distant sniper fire carried easily on the back of a cold wind. For a reason he could not quite name, Rossi had never been so reminded of home.</p><p>They made the rest of their way to the front. The shell damage had spread far and wide. Rossi almost tripped on a piece of splintered wood, having Darling’s arm to thank for catching him from falling. Hunched with the stooping trench walls, men were wondering around in the near-dark with shovels and bursts sandbags, the only light coming from the burning ends of cigarettes peeking out from the mouths of dugouts.</p><p>“Christ,” Rossi muttered, treading carefully on.</p><p>“Brother Boche gave our boys a fair time of it,” Jones said as he knelt in the mud, clawing his way to a small wooden box through which the telegraph cable passed. He tapped into the circuit, checking it for a fault. “This is buggered.”</p><p>They moved along to the next interval. Though the trench was largely intact, faults carried easily along the flimsy wire. They had gone through so much of the stuff that quality had been sacrificed for quantity sometime during the summer—and it would only get worse, Cairney had warned them. No one had the foresight to plan for such an uptake. They were supposed to be home by now.</p><p>Laying a wire was not as easy as it sounded—especially at night, in the rain, groping around in the slimy, foul mud that made the cable impossible to hold steady. It was Darling that laid the wire as he unrolled it, rain battering his exposed hands until they stung a raw red. Rossi watched them disappear and reappear, dirt caked beneath his nails and in the lines of his hands. Though he never said as much, he imagined him to be a pianist in his previous life, forced to take lessons while his passions lay elsewhere.</p><p>Rossi moved backwards at a steady pace. Almost doubled over, his feet moved out from underneath him as he went. He locked eyes with Darling. They almost laughed.</p><p>“Guan’ae no,” Rossi scolded through a hidden smile. “Ah might faw o’er.”</p><p>Obscured by the brim of his helmet, Rossi could almost make out the beginnings of laughter on his face until it dropped suddenly. Behind him one of the tunnel rats straightened and leaned on his shovel, moving his body to the side. Darling twisted around, backside falling onto the firestep. Rossi, though he did not know why, let himself fall against the wall of the trench, inadvertently making way for a group of stretcher-bearers to pass.</p><p>The sight of an empty, blood stained stretcher was no less unnerving than those that carried the wounded. Rossi clutched the cable drum. Across the way, he caught Darling’s eye once more. He seemed in contemplation, a mirror of his anguish. </p><p>“Come oan, you,” Rossi urged, shaking himself from his own stillness. “We’re nearly done.”</p><p>Darling looked down. The rain had gone some way in washing his hands clean as they hung between his knees, cable in the limp curl of his finger. His thumb ran across it, the delicate little movement like the sign of the cross.</p><p>He did not move.</p><p>“Shift it, pal,” said the tunneller, nudging Darling with the blade of his shovel.</p><p>“Let him get a haud o’ hissel, Christ,” Rossi snapped, then turned back to him. “C’mere an’ we’ll get this finished, yeah? Afore we end up like a load o’ drount rats.” He finally put down the cable drum and offered out his hand. “We canna die o’ the cauld oot here.”</p><p>Darling looked at his hand, eyes cinched against the rain. “I suppose not,” he said, and took it.  </p><p>*</p><p>Rossi picked the dry mud from the cuff of his cardigan, the little granules of dirt getting caught behind his nails. He dug them out with his teeth. The taste of earth lingered in his mouth.</p><p>They had gone back into reserve. Far, far behind the line, the only shots came from riflemen training on barren fields. Glittering with a frost that persisted long after morning, Rossi could see them from one side of his new billet. They seemed to stretch for miles, bordered on the horizon by bare trees with branches clawing towards the sky.</p><p>The other side looked upon a stream that ran parallel to the road. On either side a fence had been assembled and destroyed, the wooden planks resting on the steep banks as if scrambling to pull themselves out of the icy water. Another of the brigade’s signallers had already fallen in and been fished out again, shivering down to his bones in the early December morning. He had not been drunk, or so the rumour went, but tired.</p><p>Rossi stared at the stream. He was sat on a small bench against the side of the house, roughcast wall pressing into the back of his skull. So stuffy was their room, shared between the six of them, that he had decided to smoke outside out of courtesy.</p><p>That had been almost an hour ago.</p><p>He rubbed his raw hands together and pulled his cardigan down over his knuckles. Shoving them under his oxters, he hunched his body over to make it smaller. His breath danced in front of him as though alive. The grass beneath his feet was dead. </p><p>As he ducked his head down to wipe a wetness from his nose, movement caught his eye from down the road. It was a horse and cart with no cargo but a priest.</p><p>Father Vincent Milligan was raised in Birmingham, but he had been born in Ballymote. It was back in Sligo that he had trained to become a priest before returning to England to teach. Only in his early forties, his hair was already white as snow and he moved with a certain measured grace that many might have deemed long-gone. Rossi had acquired all that he knew about him over several of his brief visits to the front, doling out sacraments and icons of Madonna like others did whisky and cigarettes. He was never sure whose visits he anticipated more.</p><p>Rossi stood from his seat and crossed the narrow bridge over the stream. “Mornin’, Father,” he called as he approached him. “You’re keepin’ well?”</p><p>“As can be expected,” he said, swooping down to collect a satchel that rested at his feet. “Bianchi, is it not?”</p><p>“Rossi,” he supplied.</p><p>“Ah, my apologies. Rossi. Of course. You wouldn’t by any chance know where to find—” He paused to fetch a slip of paper from his pocket. The khaki matched with a clerical shirt and collar still seemed awfully unnatural to him. “—the <em>Ecole du Sacré-Cœur</em>?”</p><p>“Just aff the main road,” Rossi told him. “Ah’ll show you.”</p><p>They began to walk.</p><p>As it turned out, Father Milligan was to hold a Mass the following day. He had intended to hold it in the church not far from the school, but the brass hats had told him there was a problem with the building, and that they had not received permission from the Bishop of Arras to do so. Father Milligan had called it nonsense, but he thought better than to add to any confrontation. Lord knew there was enough of that going on already.</p><p>Rossi pushed on an iron gate and held it open, the cold metal stinging against his skin. He eyed the faded outline of a game of peevers and followed Father Milligan across the playground.</p><p>The school was cold, empty. The classrooms seemed inhabited by ghosts. On the wall behind the teacher’s desk was a painting of Saint Catherine and Pope Gregory XI in Siena. A sum of simple arithmetic was still written and unanswered in chalk on the blackboard. Turning in a small circle, fingertips brushing over the desks, a phantom pain flared up in Rossi’s palms and calves. He clenched his fist and flexed his fingers.</p><p>He never liked school.</p><p>“Frightening, isn’t it,” Father Milligan said suddenly, “how close to home we are.”</p><p>He was stood before a world map, each empire smudged with its own colour. From the Dominion of Canada down to New Zealand, no inch of the world seemed unscathed from Britain’s plunder. The sun never set on the British Empire, he could almost hear Martin say to him, nor did the blood ever run dry. </p><p>He reached up and pressed his fingertip to the map, the English Channel disappearing beneath it. “Straight shot o’er the watter,” he mumbled, remembering McKinnon’s words. He dragged his finger downward, settling it on Italy. He wondered where Tramutola sat within it, knowing only that it was somewhere south of Rome. He wondered if it felt as far away to his father as it seemed.</p><p>“Have you ever been?” Father Milligan asked.</p><p>He had thought about it, but only once, around the time he had befriended a boy called Luigi Soldati. From Lucca, his father had come to Scotland and set up an ice-cream shop near Glasgow Green. On account of his friendship with Luigi, he had gotten a job there after leaving school, filling up stone jars with ginger ale in the cellar until graduating to serving tables.</p><p>Much preferable to the bricklaying he would go on to do, it was the one source of real tension between he and his father. His father thought the Soldatis a strange and snobbish bunch, with residual politics that grated against but did not entirely oppose his own. Every penny he handed over to his father while working there was treated like blood money. Much less tribal and equally as ignorant to her husband’s politics, his mother pocketed the money into her apron and said little of it.</p><p>Despite the problems it caused at home, Rossi enjoyed spending time with Luigi and his brothers Giovanni and Francesco. When their money was made here, they would tell him, they would return to Lucca and buy land. With his father never expressing any intentions of the same, he wondered briefly if he might do so on his father’s behalf one day, returning to Tramutola many years on to find peace and common blood in its valleys.</p><p>But it had been just that: brief. The thought faded quicker than his friendship with Luigi, though his name had come up in letters from home. He had, along with his brothers, returned to Italy, but only to serve in the army.</p><p>Rossi shook his head. “Nah, ne’er,” he said, dropping his hand. “Canna be much to it if ma auld da thought Glesga better for hissel.”</p><p>He thought of Glasgow. He thought of its boasts and the backs that broke to build it. A grid of a city designed to entrap those that lived there, smothering out dreams from the streets and stars from the sky. But grim, dark, and hopeless though it was, Rossi could think of nowhere he would rather be—because there was purpose there, a certain dignity in tolerating a new day. There was his family, his friends, his shakedown on the floor.</p><p>There was none of that here.</p><p>His stomach stirred with a homesickness he thought dormant. Sitting himself on a desk, he picked at the peeling skin of his cuticles. He felt Father Milligan lay a hand on his shoulder.</p><p>“May I suggest setting your mind on things that are above, not on earth,” he said, “and remember the suffering which He may will for you now is to draw you closer to Him in the end.”</p><p>The hand on his shoulder tightened. He crossed his arm over his chest to cover it with his own and ducked his head down, chin grazing his chest. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to think of no death, no mourning, no crying, no pain. It was not his reality, but one that was promised to him, where he would be no longer a stranger nor a pilgrim as Darling had said man was on earth.</p><p>“It’s the same for all of us,” Father Milligan continued quietly. “They call this a godless place, but I have never seen so many men so close to God.”</p><p>*</p><p>Christmas was a muted affair. The French religiously abstained from any acts of warfare; the British did not. The ground froze over. The pawkies from his mother came in the last round of post. He held his palms, now covered in scratchy wool, to his cheeks. He tried not to think too much of home.</p><p>To bid a welcome farewell to the year, they gathered in the mess hall marooned along the road from Robecq to Calonne to have dinner. Under the guise of sandwiches, the leftover poultry was carved up and served on slabs of bread more than an inch thick. Rossi did not complain, eating his share so quickly that his stomach ached in protests as he washed it down with some unlabelled white wine in which Sinclair recommended adding a spoonful of sugar. It helped a little.</p><p>“Well, fellas,” Bainbridge began, “it’s been a shit year and I expect the next one to be equally as fucking so—but the company’s been not too bad.” He raised his glass in response to their affectionate grumbling. “Cheers!”</p><p>Rossi raised out of his seat a little do clink his dusty glass against theirs. Most of them were off duty, but Darling was on check with Thompson outside the Signal Office. When the new year came, he decided, he would go see him. He craned his neck to watch Jones pull up his sleeve to check his watch. By the looks of it, they had only minutes to wait.</p><p>And then it came. 1916 came.</p><p>They shook hands and sang Auld Lang Syne. Rossi did not berate their pronunciation too much but stole the bottle of wine from the table in reparation. He might have already been very drunk.</p><p>The cold outside air did well to sober him. He puffed his cheeks against it as he pulled down his cap and ventured along the road. Looking around, he tried to imagine what the village might have once looked like before the army rolled in. Quaint and lively, with houses of brick that each differed but had become dull and shrouded in khaki and dust. He wondered where the people that lived here might have gone, what they might be doing, if they might come back.</p><p>He certainly would not fancy living with all these ghosts.</p><p>There was singing coming from billets still. Rossi took a swing of wine and waved to the bodies hanging out of windows, serenading the French night sky with songs of England. He might have joined in if he had known the words.</p><p>He was still humming the tune of a song he did not know when he found Darling and Thompson, the former standing slightly more rigid in his post. It almost made Rossi laugh, but he smothered it away in his pawkie-clad hand before finishing the rest of the wine with his face screwed in displeasure. He <em>thunked</em> his head back against a wall as he let it settle in his system and let the bottle slip from his fingers. Though an accident, it did go some way to catching the men’s attention.</p><p>“Who goes there?” Darling shouted, extending his bayonet.</p><p>“The New Year!” he shouted, stepping into his view. “Calm doon, all’s well.” He cracked a dark smile but Darling did not look so pleased. “A guid New Year tae ane and aw,” he said, shaking Thompson’s hand first, then Darling’s. “Haud yer face like that and it’ll get stuck.”</p><p>Darling barred his rifle against his chest and shoved him back. He was smiling now, at least.</p><p>“Still better than yours,” he said.</p><p>“You’re gettin’ a right cheeky bastard,” he said back, voice doused in the sort of pride usually reserved between parent and child. “Here—whauraboots is Singer an’ that?”</p><p>“Across from the carpenter’s,” he answered him quietly.</p><p>It sent a shock of sorrow through his chest like a bullet but tore the earthly flesh from his bones like a shell. He tried to reassemble his thoughts and not reconjure the image in his mind of the carpenter sat in his workshop, working on a small, child-sized coffin. He did not meet Darling’s eye as he nodded his understanding and turned to walk away.</p><p>But he was stopped by a hand on his arm. It was Darling’s. In his other he held his whisky rations, untouched. He could not go first-footing without a gift, he reminded him and pushed it inside his pocket, sending him on his way again.</p><p>He found the billet with relative ease.</p><p>“’s supposed to be somebody tall, dark an’ handsome,” he told Singer as he ducked inside, “but you’ve got—Jesus Christ, Butler, I thought the Boche canned you for their twaloors.”</p><p>Butler, with a wound stripe on his jacket and a divot in his shoulder, was sat by a table on which there was a black bun barely touched, dense and contrary to life. Shuffling stiffly in his seat, he did not rise to meet Rossi, but he beckoned him over with a grin. For a man that had taken a decent piece of shrapnel not too long ago, he seemed in remarkably good spirits at best, and surprisingly undeterred at worst. He patted the seat beside him.</p><p>“Bet I’m better tasting than that shite,” he said jamming a finger in the direction of the cake which Rossi was sawing a slice from. “Your lot have a lot to answer for. Could knock a hun out with that.”</p><p>Rossi knew all too well. He and Martin had stolen a loaf of black bun from the baker’s as children and had to take turns of carrying it as they fled. They had eaten some of it in the stairwell of Rossi’s close, digging their little fingers through the pastry into the wonderfully moist innards of raisins and currants and eating it by the handful. He had gotten quite the skelp around the ear when his mother found out, but at the time it had been more than worth it.</p><p>This one was dry. He crumbled the pastry into his mouth as he sat, mournful.</p><p>“What’s food if it dinna double as a weapon?” he said. “How you keepin’?”</p><p>“Fine. Glad to get out of that fucking hospital,” Butler told him. “The nurses had us singing carols and all sorts. Thought I was gonna go the same way as Smithy.”</p><p>Smithy—one of four Smiths in their platoon—had taken to shaking very badly when the Germans sent the big guns flying over. His howling for his mother could almost be heard over the wall of noise that screamed and crashed around them, or so Butler said. Rossi had never met the boy and he never would. Last anyone heard of him he was in a hospital down in the southwest of England.</p><p>Rossi licked the taste of ginger from his gums.</p><p> “Ah well, least that’s you oot for another roond o’ this,” he said, producing the whisky from his pocket. “To a new year o’ no bein’ Boche dug meat.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>fun fact! in scotland we go hard on hogmanay because christmas celebrations were banned for 400 years after the reformation as yule was deemed too catholic. christmas only became a public holiday in 1958. also black bun is nice robert louis stevenson is just a hater. but it probably could be used as a weapon. or to build houses.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. the lee-lang night, and weep, my dear</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In January, Rossi received a fortnight-old copy of The Glasgow Herald.</p><p>Little of the war was given place on its front pages, but the third contained a picture. In it, a cherub manned a machine gun and Saint Michael manned the skies, coming to the rescue of mankind and thrusting the wickedness of their enemy down to hell. <em>Do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations</em>, Rossi thought, sliding his thumb over the figure of Death that crouched in their enemy’s trench.</p><p>Unable to find their billet, they had taken up temporary residence in the Quarter Master’s hut. It smelt rather musty and was dark despite the improvised oil lamps made of Maconochie tins they had dotted around the floor. Splayed on his stomach, Rossi had to pull one especially close to read the small print of his newspaper.</p><p>
  <em>—but the war of attrition has cost the Central Powers that in humanity which can never be replaced in the time now remaining to them. We shall not delude ourselves with the idea that a triumphal march to Berlin is easily within our power now that we are within sight of the goal to which our energies have had to be directed—not always with undeviating will—during the past year. It is a tough job that awaits our gallant men and their friends in East and West. But they who know the conditions best say they are equal to victory. And we believe them.</em>
</p><p>Rossi let his chin fall against his arm.</p><p>While he was not so sure of victory, he knew well when all of this was over that he wanted not to march triumphantly through the streets of Berlin, but to go home. To him, that seemed the greatest wealth of any soldier.</p><p>Beside him, Darling was wrapped up in a blanket with a copy of <em>Notes on Wireless</em> that had been kindly given to them by GHQ. A late Christmas present, Cairney had called it as they were dished out among them. It was, as everything seemed to be, a stark reminded of how quickly the world was moving along without them.</p><p>Not that the pamphlet provided a particularly glowing report.</p><p>“It is impossible to obtain good results from the delicate wireless instruments unless the set is installed in a reasonably dry dugout,” Jones read aloud. “Heavily shelled areas must be avoided. Are this lot pulling our pissers?”</p><p>“Ah liked the part aboot needin’ six o’ us to carry the bastartin thing,” Rossi chimed in.</p><p>If not for some comedic value, Rossi was not given to complaining. He was too proud to admit that this—all of this—was generally better than his lot back home. That was how they got you, Martin had said; starving men would do any number of things that seemed beyond the boundaries of human behaviour for a stomach full of bread and stew—that was perhaps the most human instinct of all. Self-preservation. Survival.</p><p>And the Army preyed on that.</p><p>Predatory. That was what Martin had called it, sending Rossi’s bristles up. So long was it now, he could hardly remember if it were this time or the following that he had caught Martin’s nose with his fist, unable to listen to anymore of his drivel.</p><p>Rossi stared down at his paper and turned the page. He felt a heat rise beside him, the length of Darling’s body coming to press against him from hip to shoulder. Whether he had finished or abandoned the pamphlet was unclear. Eyesight a touch shoddier than his own, he had to duck further towards the tiny text to read it, casting a shadow where Rossi was trying to read. He made no move to stop him, instead flitting his eyes along the line of Darling’s profile. </p><p>“What’s an irregular marriage?” Darling asked him suddenly.</p><p>He sucked on his teeth as he thought, concluding, “It’s like—ye just agree to be mairit, wi’ no banns and that.”</p><p><em>Moreover, the unprecedented number of 1260 war weddings were registered during the year, making rather over a third of the registrations of “irregular” marriages for 1915</em>, the article read. The idea of such a marriage was one Rossi could scarcely entertain, if only out of fear of his mother stringing him up in the nearest gallows, but he understood the uptake and its legal implications. None of that troubled him, though—he had left all his property in the event of his death to his mother.</p><p>“I knew a boy that jumped over the border with his missus,” Bainbridge said. His voice was slightly muffled from the fingers in his mouth, trying to waggle out a rotten tooth. “Had to stay there a bit before they let them marry, mind.”</p><p>“I suppose there’s a certain romance to it,” Darling said.</p><p>“Maist folk are just daein it on the cheap,” Rossi told him, tongue between his teeth as he shoved his shoulder into his.</p><p>“You lot are a bunch of tight bastards up there,” Jones said, using the pamphlet to catch his laughter and cover his face from the pencil Rossi threw in his direction. “Oh, come on, Jackie boy, you know it’s true.” While he inwardly conceding to as much, he hurled his own pamphlet at him for good measure. “Oi!”</p><p>“Have you got someone back home?” Darling asked him quietly much later. “Someone you might marry?”</p><p>Rossi did not. A camouflage of circumstances had denied him the opportunity of doing so. Equally so, he shared in no compulsion for a woman’s touch, no great need, and dared not think, or let anyone else think, of what that might actually mean.   </p><p>That was not to say he had never been with a woman. One of his friends, Jonjo, had an older sister named Grace that he had been quite besotted by in his adolescence, who took him to the cavity bed she by night shared with her two sisters and showed him what was what. Inhibited and a great deal anxious, it had not been as pleasant or natural of an experience as others claimed it to be. To settle himself, he concocted a familiar guilt that underpinned most of the rest of his life and let that be the deterrent to keep himself swaddled in his own solitude.</p><p>“Nah,” he said. “No got the time for that lark. You?”</p><p>Darling laughed.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>Rossi sat up, blanket slipping from his shoulders. Darling was nothing more than a silhouette against the darkness brushed with a soft orange light that came from far beyond the window.</p><p>“I appreciate the fact you think that might have been a possibility,” he said.</p><p>“Lassies like a gentleman,” Rossi offered.</p><p>“What sour luck for our comrades,” Darling said then, a tad sharper than Rossi had been expecting. It made him laugh. When he spoke again, however, his voice was infinitely quieter. “I do wish for it, though. Not for romantic love exactly, but the kind one can find accidentally, stumbling upon a person and, without realising it, becoming completely disclosed.”</p><p>*</p><p>“Try to keep an orderly line, men!”  </p><p>Rossi half-turned, feet padding along the cold anteroom floor. Like Saint Peter at his gate, a RAMC officer was stood by the door barking orders for everyone to take off their boots and puttees. A little further along, two lines of men were conducting foot inspections. As they spent very little time in the trenches—not that their dugouts were as cushy as the infantrymen liked to claim—they were given a customary look-over and sent on their way.</p><p>Next to greet them was a stocky French washerwoman shouting them down to their underclothes. Cairney and Sergeant Taylor stood abashed beside her, muttering about divvying up the soap cakes and not making too much of a mess, but making no great effort to enforce either.</p><p>The baths were old wine barrels, large enough to accommodate four men at a time. Darling, using French that was more enthusiastic than accurate, managed to discover that the barrel furthest from the door kept the warmest for the longest. Climbing the makeshift ladder inside, Rossi let himself be completely submerged in it. He thought of the tin bath that lived in the kitchen back home, the grimy public baths the council seemed to have forgotten. Removed from it, it seemed a bizarre way to live, but he supposed that was the trick of it—you were never supposed to leave, to completely understand the absurdity of your situation.</p><p>Of course, he had always known that there was better, always imagined something more. He suffered, but not in ignorance.</p><p>But it stoked no action in him, no revolution. It seemed the Clyde had begun running red while he thought it best to make the best of things. To him, Martin and those like him seemed ignorant of the consequences that awaited their insurrections, and that was a savage repression he was not willing to be chained to by association.</p><p>And it would happen.</p><p>Rossi knew well enough that the mysterious authority under which he lived his life had been made tangible by the Army. That omnipresent pressure that kept his wrists in servile chains now wore caps trimmed with red and threatened shots at dawn. Plundered of everything but self-respect and—for the time being, at least—their lives, such suffering was mitigated by cheap luxuries of whisky and cigarettes, while not entirely concealing the toil.</p><p>That, Rossi thought as he scrubbed at his skin, he could feel in his bones. Years of it crushing them down to dust, they were now destined to be bleached under the French sun where God might see fit to take him.</p><p>Not that he let his thoughts settle on such a thing. They had berated Darling for less, his scribbled terrors an unsettling read when Sinclair had plucked it from his hands. His imagination did not seem to fit his outward optimism, as if that itself was an act. But where, then, did it end? What of his humour, his turn of speech, his accent, his sense of honour? Was it mere condition, or was it performance? Were men so frighteningly similar that those of a higher class must be taught to perform a distinction?</p><p>Rossi watched Darling with what was probably an uncomfortable scrutiny as they collected their pay and made their way into the village with a promise to Cairney that they would be back before eight. He stayed back with him, letting Jones lead their hunt for a half-decent pint of beer through the streets, eventually coming to a small cottage now opened as something of a canteen. They squeezed around a table and ordered beer and biscuits on tick.</p><p>“Did you see the big guns?” Bainbridge asked, still sore in the mouth. “That lot look like they’re gonna be a handful.”</p><p>“I don’t know about that. You know what they say,” Jones said, “the bigger the gun the smaller the cock.”</p><p>They all laughed but Darling, who shook his head before sinking the last of his wine and patting down his moustache. There was still wine on his lips, but he did not smack them clean. How strange you are, Rossi thought, but it did little to lessen his fondness for the boy.</p><p>They drank until past seven o’clock—<em>pip-emma</em>, Rossi’s brain unhelpfully supplied—when the infantrymen started to arrive. Slightly more boisterous, they agreed it best to pay and leave.</p><p>For one reason or another, ever since they had completely fallen back into reserve, a strange bitterness had risen between them. Bainbridge called it mistrust, which Rossi thought more than possible. It was natural to distrust what you did not understand. What were they to think of them disappearing into their dugouts, speaking Signalese and returning only to walk among them when those dastardly cables were needing fixed?</p><p>Not that this suspicion was particularly new to Rossi. He was the son of an immigrant deemed strange for his language, religion, and penchant for working on Sundays. A brief spell of hostility towards him preceded Italy’s abandonment of staked neutrality.</p><p>“Mon,” he said, pulling on his pawkies. “Afore they gi’e it to us tight.”</p><p>*</p><p>It was night-time, but nobody slept.  </p><p>Though it was spring, the nights still fell into a deep chill. Rossi shivered where he stood, Bainbridge crouching beside him as he took the lamp’s spare bulbs from their box. Just behind them both was Cairney, who was looking up at the hill through his binoculars. Somewhere on the shallow slope was Thompson, Jones, and Taylor, only visible from such a distance when the moonlight caught the edge of their equipment.</p><p>Rossi erected the tripod stand.</p><p>“Tell me what he’s doing,” Cairney said. </p><p>Rossi and Bainbridge shifted their eyes between each other before Rossi carefully took a bulb from the box.</p><p>“Bulb, three-point-five volts, is being inserted horizontally into the sliding carrier and clamped to the ebonite block,” Bainbridge commentated, eyes squinting at Rossi in the dark. For some reason they had decided to forgo torches. “Carrier is being adjusted to left for focusing. Metal slide is being opened and key tubing is being extended. Rossi’s fallen on his arse.”</p><p>Losing his footing on uneven ground, he had fallen over, thumb pressed to the sending key. The lamp emitted a short burst of light, startling Cairney from his binoculars.</p><p>“Good grief, men,” he muttered.</p><p>For the next hour, they sent messages back and forth across the hillside, rotating between the lamp and telescope. They would have stayed longer if it weren’t for a farmer and his son appearing from the woods with quite literally their pitchforks raised, telling them off for—what they assumed to be—encroaching on their land. Rossi hardly thought he would like soldiers hanging around his fields like ghouls, throwing light where it did not belong in the dark. </p><p>Cairney, as cold and uninterested in this new round of training as they were, had them send a message to the others to get off the hill and return to the village. He would have someone above his pay grade deal with this problem.</p><p>They trudged back to the signal store.</p><p>“I don’t know why we bother with this, Sir,” Bainbridge complained as he took the wooden box which contained the lamp and shoved it back beside the others. “I could do all this shit with my eyes closed.”</p><p>“Cheer up, Bainbridge,” Cairney said as he made a note of the equipment’s return, “it’s transportation training tomorrow.”</p><p>They both groaned. With the exception of being stuck with one of their brigade’s regiments for rifle practice, transportation training was the worst. Not only was it tedious and labour-intensive, but it meant loading carts pulled by the most temperamental horses in the entire British Army. Only Sinclair enjoyed working with them, having previously done so back home in Yorkshire. One almost kicked Thompson’s head from off his shoulders.</p><p>“That’ll be us moving, then,” Bainbridge said as he passed Rossi a cigarette as they walked. “Down south.”</p><p>“Fancy a change of scenery, so I do,” said Jones. He had caught up with them as they left the store. “Reckon we’ll ever get to Paris?”</p><p>“No before the Huns do.”</p><p>“Give off, Rossi,” Jones complained, but his voice lightened quickly. “Here, do you hear that?” he asked, disappearing off to the side where the side of the road dipped in a de facto gutter. Separating the road from the field was a high bush, mostly bare but bursting with new life. Jones was pointing over it. “Look! Lambs!”</p><p>Bainbridge and Rossi threw a curious look between each other before approaching the bush. As Jones had cried, there were half a dozen or so little scrawny messes of wool parading around on shaky legs, the white of their coat illuminated by the light beginning to creep its way over the horizon. Their bleating seemed obvious now, shrill in the cold air that would thicken as the hours passed. The presence of their new lives seemed strange, but only because man had made it so. Nature did well not to listen. </p><p>Rossi rested his arms atop the bush. “Noisy wee fuckers,” he commented, taking a drag from his cigarette.</p><p>“Must have some set of lungs,” Jones said.</p><p>“Aye—sonsie pricks.”</p><p>They moved off down the road, following it right where it forked towards the main street. Rossi could just about see the church’s steeple in the distance. With practically their entire Division now corralled into the one place, Father Milligan had finally managed to hold a Mass in decent numbers, and no small amount of confessions either.</p><p>Rossi had not yet brought himself to be among them, letting his sins fester a little longer, but he would have to make a point of doing so before they went. For his soul’s sake.</p><p>Whether he was supposed to be privy to such information was neither here nor there, but the fact of the matter was he knew what was to happen at the Somme was big. There had been mutterings about such an offensive since December. Their fellow sappers had already begun to travel south. Something had to be done after Loos.</p><p>Loos. It sat like a stone in his stomach as he pressed out his cigarette on the wall of his billet. Names he had known since childhood filtered back to him in letters from home, telling of a missing son here, a dead brother there.</p><p>How personal his little country’s grief seemed to be—how she seemed to know all her sons by heart.</p><p>*</p><p>“There you are, Darling,” Jones called as the other man approached. “Thought we’d gotten rid of you.”</p><p>“Not bloody likely,” Bainbridge said, throwing an arm over Darling’s shoulder and falling into his step. They crossed the threshold into their billet, now almost entirely empty. “Death couldn’t take our Darling away.”</p><p>For the past week, Darling had been working out of headquarters. “Interpreting stuff” was all he said of it, finally putting his German to good use. Rossi was fairly sure they had actual translators for that sort of thing, getting information out of POWs and the like, and Darling could do that if he so wished, but he always came back. Bainbridge was right about that. They would never be parted now; they had become friends and brothers of circumstance, and it was no less genuine than the real thing.</p><p>Darling collected his things. He packed his bag neatly and gave his notebook a onceover. He nodded at Rossi when he was done.</p><p>They were to march to the station that day, and there catch a train to Amiens. Most of their equipment had been sent ahead of them, travelling in greater comfort than Rossi suspected they might do. One day they would have machines that work themselves, Cairney had grumped to them, and soldiers made of more tin than just their hats. </p><p>“Bet ye missed hangin’ wi’ us sorry bastards,” Rossi said as they marched at ease. Sober, he was not as partial to the singsong Jones had started. “Swear am a bawhair aff getting landed wi’ they weirdos wi’ the pigeons.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t mind handling the pigeons,” Darling said.</p><p>“Exactly ma point.”</p><p>Darling rolled his eyes and laughed. “I missed you a lot more when I wasn’t around. Perhaps Propertius had a point.”</p><p>“Whoever the fuck that is,” Rossi said, giving Darling’s shoulder a jostle as they went.</p><p>They arrived at the station early enough to watch the train pull in, the rumble of its approach like soft, distant gunfire until it came to a screeching halt, surrounded by pillows of black smoke wafting into the spring air. Designed for cargo, not commuters, they were loaded in like cattle as Taylor stood with a clipboard, striking off each of their names as they boarded. It was nothing more than a dark box on the inside. Rossi hoped they could keep the door open a bit.</p><p>“Not enough room in here to swing a rat, never mind a bloody cat,” Bainbridge said, falling onto his backside beside Rossi. “Your foot’s up my arse.”</p><p>“Your arse is oan ma foot.”</p><p>“Shift it!”</p><p>“As thrilling as this argument is, will you two shut your holes,” Thompson grouched from the other side of the container.</p><p>Rossi did move, crushing himself further into the corner. The entrapped space had already begun to grow warmer, the smell of bodies days removed from a good wash stuffing up the air. Darling was directly across from him now, fishing out something from his pocket. It crinkled. He produced a bar of chocolate, pulled back the wrapper and snapped off a piece. He offered it out with a, “It’ll probably melt if I keep it.”</p><p>Rossi took it and broke it up again, offering half to Bainbridge in a silent truce. He thanked him but refused it, citing his sore teeth, so Rossi popped the lot into his mouth. It was the dark sort, more bitter than sweet. Rossi’s mouth twisted at its foreign richness, licking the taste from his teeth. He had once nicked such a chocolate from Mr Reid’s sweetie shop, not tall enough to then reach the tablet. It had scarcely been worth the guilt and effort at all.</p><p>That was what he got for stealing, he supposed.</p><p>“You ever been to Paris?” he asked.</p><p>Darling shook his head. “Never,” he said. “Why do you ask?”</p><p>Rossi shrugged. As he did, the train started to move. He could feel the rumble of wheels in his bones as it travelled up through the floor. The scream and whistle of the locomotive departing were almost deafening.</p><p>“Just seems like somewhere ye’d go,” he told him, finishing his thought.</p><p>“I went to Nice once, with my family.” Darling stopped there, but Rossi nodded for him to continue. “It’s so much warmer down there, so much more pleasant. I never knew water could look such a way until I saw the Mediterranean. One feels like a lover, even if they are alone.”</p><p>Shuffling himself down to make a pillow of his shoulder for Bainbridge’s head, Rossi tried to imagine it. A blue to fall in love with he could not conjure, but he thought of it pellucid, exposed of all its secrets for as far as man could see below. He had only gone to the coast once or twice, down to Saltcoats where dozens of little boats sat in the dark harbour and the wind seemed unduly strong. The water had never been clear.</p><p>He had taken Elisa and Maria once, hands welded to theirs, petrified of losing them. They had jumped the train that day, he remembered, being shaken by the one that carried him now, no fresh sea air waiting for him on the other side. They had sand in their shoes for weeks. Rossi wiggled his toes in his tacketies, thinking he could still feel it.</p><p>“Cornwall’s good enough for my Maggie,” Sinclair said almost wistfully from beside Darling. “Said I’d take her back there when all this is over.”</p><p>“Well, if she’ll settle for you, she’ll settle for anything.”</p><p>“Piss off!”</p><p>“You ever get tired o’ being such a cunt, Jonsey?” Rossi shot over.</p><p>Before he could retort, Thompson scolded them both into silence. Rumour had it he had been a teacher in his previous life and Rossi was not inclined to disagree. Very little was known about him but that he was at the older age of enlistment and had a family. Rossi had seen him look at a photograph of a woman and young boy, but he had never divulged any information on either. They all thought better than to ask.</p><p>They sat, smoked and tried to sleep in relative silence, the hours passing slow in their boredom. The only reprieve came when the train was side-tracked to give way for a small ammunition train. They hung from the doors and gave salute to the few men aboard.</p><p>Rossi did not move to join them. Bainbridge was still asleep on his shoulders, knocked out by an unhealthy dose of whisky.</p><p>“Huns don’t know what they’re in for,” Jones said with an odd glee as he sat back down.</p><p>To which Darling countered with a soft, “And neither do we.”</p><p>*</p><p>Rossi spent his first birthday in France on wagon duty.</p><p>It was raining, naturally, as if he needed the reminder of home. Light as it was, it hung in the air and soaked him right through, passing a shiver down his spine as he stood. If he were home, he thought as he shoved himself as far under the tarpaulin as he could, it would be as mundane a day as this. He would wake up early and go to work, have a beer down the pub with the boys and, if he was so lucky, return home to a plate of fried fish and chips in the centre of the table.</p><p>They would all share a supper, chips drenched in vinegar and fish sharp with bones. It all ended up crushed in Gianni’s tiny fist as he shoved it into his mouth.</p><p>Rossi smiled sadly through the rain, the warmth of the memory producing enough smoke to fill his chest fit to burst. It had barely subsided by the time he was relieved of his duty in the early hours of the morning, condensing down to something heavy between his lungs and soul, his heart crushed to a diamond.</p><p>Sinking an inch of whisky, he pulled a piece of paper from his pack and settled on his front by a candle.</p><p>
  <em>26 April 1916</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Mother, </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I have not written to you in quite a while, but in my thoughts you have persisted always. Even more so, on this day, I think of each sacrifice you have made since answering the call to raise me in love. I think of your kisses and stern words, ill-fitted ganseys and bedtime songs. What a waste it must seem to you now, learning of the grief of all the other mothers of sons born in the dying ends of the last century, but I beg you not to be disheartened. Maintain, as I am sure you do, that our separation and suffering will be rewarded in the eternity left to us. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Certainly this is a horror that could not have been foretold, but in truth I fear it little. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I have pleaded for you always in my hour of need, and you have always been there, as He intended you to be. Know, if it should come, in the hour of my death I should plead for you once more, comforted always by the mere thought of you. I too shall plead for the prayers of the Blessed Mother, who I know you entrust with my soul above any. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Should it not come, I will return to you in God’s good time. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>— Giacomo</em>
</p><p>In a fit of regret, Rossi seized the letter and crumpled it in a tight fist. He was very near to taking it to the small flame that accompanied him until Darling stirred in the throes of it, rubbing the last of his dreams from his eyes in the near-dark. Across the floor, he moved towards him with his blanket and offered out a silent hand when he reached him. Rossi too was quiet when he handed it over, sinking his head into his arms.</p><p>He heard but did not see Darling begin to unravel his letter, flattening it out on the floor before them, directly by the light.</p><p>Darling was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “One day you’ll have to tell me why it comes so naturally to you to turn to the mother for her intercessions than to the Son Himself.” Rossi raised his head to look at him. “It’s the one thing I’ve never understood.”</p><p>There was, of course, a proper answer, but Rossi thought it best to keep it to himself. Wars as gory as this one had been fought on as much for centuries, absent of a now common foe. Father Macdonough had said in as many words that their loyalty to crown and empire would do well to not only mitigate the distrust their fellow countrymen had for them, but the Holy See itself.</p><p>Instead, Rossi asked only, “Have ye e’er heard a man here cry for anyone but his mother?”</p><p>Darling stared back at him, uttering not a word.</p><p>Daring to take it no further, Rossi picked up his letter once more and held it to the fire. The flames ate at the paper until it wilted away, tendrils of its charred remains joining the melting wax below it. He rubbed his fingers together where they nipped.</p><p>While distracted, Darling had moved and returned. Now he offered out a parcel wrapped in brown paper—notably resealed—and knotted with a thin string for a ribbon. Rossi sat up and took it with a thank you and eyebrow raised, he pulled at the string and let it fall undone. The wrapping too, held down by nothing, unravelled itself to reveal a book. On the front it read <em>Elegies of Sextus Propertius: Book One. </em></p><p>“I had Father send it over,” Darling told him quietly. “I thought it might be of interest to you.”</p><p>Rossi caught his thumb under the first few pages and opened it up. It was poetry. He crooked a new frown in Darling’s direction, letting his fingers travel down the bare side of the page. Never was he able to understand or appreciate the art of whittling words down to so few.</p><p>“Didn’t know ah seemed the type,” he said.</p><p>Darling turned his head like a confused animal. “I didn’t realise there was such a thing.” He scooted closer, edge of his blanket falling into Rossi’s lap. “It’s just words.”</p><p>Returning his eyes to the page, Rossi noticed that a few of the lines had been marked, underlined in a light pencil. He picked up the book and brought it closer to read. “Bravely will I endure knives and savage fires,” he read aloud, eyes flitting to Darling when the line broke, “just let me say whatever I want in my rage.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>fun fact! during the war, almost 1 in 6 marriages in scotland were irregular. this, unlike in previous years, was probably as a result of the relative ease and quickness of these types of marriage (as opposed to cost and religious indifference.) civil marriages did not exist under scots law until 1940 - the year irregular marriages were abolished. as it was, all "regular" marriages were religious ceremonies, though they did not have to take place within a church building or require parental consent (hence high numbers of runaway marriages in scotland), but did need to be presided over by an authorised celebrant.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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